Forum Moderators: DixonJones
Whenever I Google up a suspect robot or user agent, I see endless lists of
people's statistics. Seems nuts to me, but they might have a reason,
selling the site or whatever. - Larry
Also you can count the compare your top SE rankings to your competitions to get a good idea.
There are some really good white papers on finding out about competitors Search engine traffic and what to do with that data. You can sticky me for them.
Oh there is one more way. You can purchase the full blown Hitwise product for 40k+ (I would rather keep the money!) but the data from them is good.
"EVOrange" SM'ed me a really good online service to view other sites traffic Thanks A lot.
The Alexa toolbar gives some good info on a site.
I am not so sure what information about sites that Alexa gives. They seem innacurate with smaller traffic sites and do not give any specific information in terms of traffic.
I think something more detailed about sites that we monitor in the serps would help us out more even if we had to pay for it.
unless you actually get hold of the others sites logs (well the log files aren’t that accurate ether) No method will ever be accurate.
1). yes exactly, unless you can actually download someone's log files then the info available is only a calculated guess of some kind - and the way this works is that the more traffic a site gets the more accurate the calculation will be, consiquently with a low traffic site the calculation can be wildly out.
2). well the log files aren’t that accurate either ... not so, log files are completely accurate! (given that occasionally people will deliberately fake user agents and so on - but the hits are still logged)
... however the actual analysis of log files is what is sometimes inaccurate due to the way the data is analysed.