There are many reasons that require for you to know how popular, serious, or how good a web site is.
You might need to start business with some other sites, buy products, use their services or you may want to advertise on a web site; in any of these cases you need to gather information about that site first.
This article will point some important things you can verify about a web site simply by the URL of a site.

See how many sites on the internet point to that site.

Go to http://www.google.com/ and type: “link:www.somesite.com” Google will show you how many sites on the internet link to that site you mentioned. For example site with over 500 backward links should be in business for at least 1-2 years a really popular site like Google has around 2 Millions backward links (sites pointing to it).

Alexa toolbar (shows site traffic, speed and more).

Alexa Toolbar will show you the traffic rank of that site comparing to the other millions of sites in the internet, for example #1, #2, #3 are always Google, MSN and Yahoo if you install this toolbar it will show you the rank of any page you visit, this way you will know if that page is a page without any traffic or you can compare it’s traffic rank with other site’s rank.
Wordpress.org currently has Alexa traffic rank 441, this means that wordpress.org is the 441th most visited site on the internet, that is pretty high if you ask me, currently there are over 6 millions sites indexed by alexa.com.
Alexa.com toolbar is very popular and this maxes the stats to be very accurate; the toolbar is the one that allows the indexes and ranks to be built according to the sites that the toolbar users visit.
The toolbar also shows site speed compared to other sites on the internet, related links, user reviews about that site and other important info.
If Alexa traffic rank says “no data” then is very bad, that site has less than 5 users each day A rank over 5 000 000 would mean less than 20 visitors each day. A rank under 500 means the site has millions of visitors each day.

Google Toolbar

The Google Toolbar will show you Google PageRankâ„¢ , also known as “PR” the Google PageRank is a value from 0 to 10, 0 is worst, 10 is best, this rank is calculated based on the content of a site and based on the number and quality of the links that point to that site. It is considered that a site with higher page rank is also displayed higher in Google search results.
Getting to a PageRank 10 is almost impossible for normal users, some of the sites with PageRank 10 are Google, Adobe (not many). Many blogs also got to a high page rank (PR7, PR8), this is due to the fact that most blogs link to one another, blogs are sites that update frequently (Google likes that), also important sites link to the blogs temporary when a blog is updated.

Check the design and functionality of a site

A very bad designed site is not hard to spot if you see images not loading, links pointing to “page not found” and other functionality problems is clear that that site is not serious, webmaster doesn’t care about it, etc; You should not see mistakes like that on serious sites; Also… if you are interested in buying products or services from a site that has functionality problems you have big chances that your order or actions on that site not to be processed correctly.

Check address and contact details of the site owner

Before making an idea about the importance of a site sometimes you also need to know details like name and address of the person that registered the site, this can be done by many services and is called “whois”, “domain whois” or “domain lookup”, for example by accessing http://www.whois.sc/google.com you will see street address, phone number and more.
The domain lookup might show you important information about a site.

See the user reviews about a site

This is also done by Alexa (an Amazon company), go to alexa.com , type an url likw http://www.yahoo.com/ in the seach box then click “overview”, it will show over 200 user reviews and ratings about Yahoo, curently yahoo user rating is 4/5.
The user review might help you realise that the site you are about to use might be a fraud, not delivering products or services, might misuse your personal information, etc, you can find these warnings in Alexa user reviews from users that already got burned once.
Examples of user reviews: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?q=&url=www.ikobo.com

See how a site was few years ago (waybackmachine.org)

This cannot directly show how serious a web site is but it can provide some additional information about the background of a site.
To see how a site was few months or years ago go to http://www.waybackmachine.org/ , for example here is how Google was like in 1998: http://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google.com/

Check the html code

This is probably if you are really exigent and you might want to try this with the most perfect web sites, you can verify if the html code complies with the validation standards.
Go to http://validator.w3.org/ and enter an url, if the url passed the validation then is very clear that the web master of that sites has advanced html skills and maintains a very accurate and clean html code. You should also know that is hard to maintain a site that complies with all these validation standards and that many important web sites don’t (yahoo.com” “Failed validation, 41 errors”).

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I hope you found this information usefull while most of the webmasters already know all these things.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 5:54 am and is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.