Friday, May 05, 2006

Cross Referencing Alexa with Google

I follow the startup space closely. When companies are going head to head, I love to look at traffic figures and see who is winning. Alexa while not all that accurate does show trends.

http://www.alexaholic.com/insiderpages.com+judysbook.com+yelp.com+citysearch.com
This link shows a few of the companies going after the local review market. Citysearch is the old man, Yelp, Judysbook, and Insiderpages are the up and comers. The Alexa graph shows CitySearch the far and away traffic leader. Yelp next and then it's close between Insiderpages and Judysbook.

If you do a search on Google, with site:yelp.com or any of the other domains it will say how many pages Google has indexed (this isn't completely accurate either, but good for trends) from the domain.

Citysearch: 22,000,000
Yelp: 2,370,000
Insiderpages: 1,150,000
Judysbook: 71,000

Interestingly, the traffic rankings in Alexa corresponds to the number of pages in Google. So the more pages you have indexed in Google, the more traffic you had in Alexa. In Yahoo and MSN, it didn't work that way. Yahoo and MSN reported more pages indexed from Judysbook than Yelp.

My conclusion is if you want to beat your competitor for traffic is to get more (legitimate) pages indexed in Google.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

While our strategy is quite different than these players, we have also found getting interesting content built by our merchants to being important to the overall pages indexed and thereby getting them exposure in local searches.

This is something that InsiderPages has executed on extremely well relative to the amount of content created versus others in the space. Stu understood the issue/opportunity early on.

As we moved from thousands of merchants to ten's of thousands this became very obvious to us. In the end the local consumer is often searching on Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc...having more merchants with unique local content makes this search experience more valuable for the local merchant.