Checking on your competition

You'd be surprised how many sites dont password protect their stats

[garry]

During the xmas rush, I was wondering how my site was faring compared to other sites and decided to go "shopping" on my competitors sites.
First stop....their stats button and lo & behold if about a half dozen sites that ranked better than me, displayed their web stats to the World.

Yes it was the freebies like I use and they didnt bother with a password.(some were not woth the stats however)
It was interesting to see that although they ranked better than me (but I use adwords etc) we were on par with our various stats accross several pages in Google.

This post will probably only affect little sites like mine where I run the whole site & my free stats (with password)because I am not up to speed with the more effective stats programs.

[coconutz]

It's also interesting to see where their visitors are coming from and the search phrases that are being used to find them.

I've picked up a couple of nice links from looking at their referrers. One link I picked up this way sends me a nice trickle of visitors.

Searching on AltaVista I found quite a few sites similar to mine that are using a public tracker, I've bookmarked all of these and take a look throught them about once a month.