Is there one unbiased source for finding out the most visited web sites?

For example: I have a client that sells boats. Is there a web site that I can go to, to find out what boating sites across the WWW are the most popular sites in terms of hits for boating dealers, etc.?

I visited www.W3C.org, but couldn't find anything. . . . Is there another place I should be looking?

I think you should visit this tool. It might be useful that you are looking for.
http://www.iwebtool.com/rank

There really isn't any way to know how many hits a site gets unless they tell you. That information is logged by the website's server and generally not released. Any site claiming to give you those kind of statistics will have some kind of bias included at best.

You can find out what sites rank the highest in the various search engines for a particular term. That's more likely what you want anyway. The tool etech listed above is one and there are plenty more sites and downloadable software you can find.

You can also simply type your term in a search engine and see which site's come up. Chances are the sites on the first page will be getting the most page visits (at least from that given search engine) There are still a lot more ways to find a site than through a search engine.

One of the best services for this type of information is hitwise (www.hitwise.com). They use a range of monitoring means to provide information on the busiest sites across a range of sectors and even sectors of your own definition.

But... (there is always a but)... This is incredibly valuable information and ever who sets the price of their services is quite aware of that fact!

someguy do you know how accurate sites like hitwise are? From what I understand they're more accurate for very popular sites like yahoo or ebay and a lot less accurate for less popular sites. I realize that riptide is looking for the most popular sites, but I would tend to doubt that boating sites as a category are the most popular sites.

I'm not by any means an expert in sites like hitwise or how they collect their data so it may just be my own ignorance in the subject.

If you know more how sites like hitwise collect their data I would be happy to hear it. Thanks.

This page goes into more details:
http://www.hitwise.co.uk/products-se...w-we-do-it.php

Basically, rather than monitoring a very niche group of users (ala Alexa) they monitor on a network/ISP level - taking in much larger groups at a go. More importantly, it is also weighted to universe estimates in order to be more representative.

How accurate the end result is I couldn't say. I have always been impressed by what they have produced though and am am not aware of any service with a similar depth of reporting.

They have usually got a few free reports available on the site (never for the sector you want though!). This are a bit lighter on details but give you an idea of the end result.

Hi,

I like sites like Metrics Market its traffic indicator tool they claim can be up to 15% Out - its only good for sites with a reasonable traffic level, but its free and it quite good. I also like Alexa which gives a rough indication based on data from sites with the alexa toolbar.

Whilst some may say these two tools are a bit crude, i would say that they rate all sites using the same metrics so imo it provides a good bench mark to know if one site is doing better than another and they dont cost you a bean.

Meanwhile i guess hitwise is the market leader but it costs a small fortune and im not convinced its worth the spend. One webmaster i know swears by hitwise but some sites estimates i know for a fact are wrong so its not 100% - but i guess short of webmasters submitting a copy of their logs no traffic indicator tool is going to be 100%

Rich

Originally Posted by RichTC

I like sites like Metrics Market its traffic indicator tool they claim can be up to 15% Out - its only good for sites with a reasonable traffic level, but its free and it quite good.

That's an interesting site. I've never seen it before. I entered agitar.com (a site I manage) and it estimated it had 33,000 visitors in the last 30 days. In reality it had 11,000 visitors, but 50,000 visits (in other words, many of our visitors came back repeatedly). Then I entered outshine.com (a site I own) and it estimated 30,000 visitors in the last 30 days. In reality, it had 13,000 visits (I don't have stats on visitor vs. visits for that site).

So, it seems pretty far off. It'd be OK for very ballpark figures. I've bookmarked it. Even if it's way off, it (hopefully) gives me some indication of general popularity of a site.

Originally Posted by Riptide

I have a client that sells boats. Is there a web site that I can go to, to find out what boating sites across the WWW are the most popular sites in terms of hits for boating dealers, etc.?

I believe this is what you're looking for:

http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/

What's nice is, if you do a good job picking your site and 3 competitors, other similar sites will be listed.

-Tony

I think sites like metrics market and hitwise can provide reasonable results for sites that get a lot of traffic, but they can really fall off for smaller sites.

I entered two sites in metrics market. I know there's very little traffic on both sites. Both are new sites that have yet to do any significant marketing and I have access to the statistics for them. Each of the sites has had less than 1000 visitors in the last 30 days. The estimated traffic returned was 35,000 for one of the sites and 40,000 for the other.

The problem I see with using these these web statistics sites is that if you happened across one of the sites I entered and saw it as competiton you would think both had some decent traffic and you might try to emulate a little of what each did to improve your traffic.

I think you need to know in advance roughly what the traffic of the sites you are checking is before you can really tell if the results have any value.

aboyd, the marketleap site is one I use to check backlinks for sites all the time. It's pretty good.

I just want to add to my previous post that the visitor checking sites can be very useful for larger sites. You just have to be a little careful with them and check against other sources to see how valid they may be.

Either of the two sites I tried could also be searched for in any search engine to check the number of backlinks they have. When you saw that neither had much you could easily surmise that metrics market was clearly off for this site.

As long as you use another source to check the visitor stats in some way you can get a useful comparision of site traffic.