Pandia takes a look at indicators for web site popularity in general and the SEOmoz Page Strength indicator in particular.

We live in a culture obsessed with indicators and statistics. It is as if any phenomenon that cannot be measured is unreal in some strange way. Hence benchmarking has become one of the buzzwords of the day.

Admittedly part of the explanation for this trend is the competitive streak of homo sapiens, and the need of business people and policy makers to measure the efficiency of their strategies and measures.

It is hard to measure the success of a web site or a web page, however, as it all depends on what it is you are trying to find out: The number of visitors? The number of sales caused by a web page? The number of voters rallying to your cause?

You can use web metrics software to get an overview over the behavior of your own visitors, but how do you get access to information regarding the web sites of others?

Google PageRank

One way is to download the Google toolbar in order to read the PageRank of a specific web page.

PageRank is Google’s measure of how “popular” or “influential” a web page is. The formula behind this indicator is secret, but the number of incoming links to a web page is clearly important, as is the “quality” and “relevance” of those links.

The PageRank given by the Google toolbar is not updated on a regular basis, and must be taken with a grain of salt.

Alexa ranking

Another popular source of information is the Alexa site. Alexa (owned by Amazon) is basing its web site rankings on data gathered from users of its Alexa toolbar.

The users of the toolbar are probably not representative for the web population as a whole, but the indicators do probably give you a rough indication of a web site’s popularity.

Composite indicators

The weaknesses of all these indicators have caused people to look for alternatives. One way is to develop a composite indicator that combines information from several sources.

The advantage of composite indicators is that avoid the weakness of basing an evaluation on one narrow and unreliable measure only. The problem is that it is hard to decide the weight of each and every component in the overall score.

The SEOmoz Page Strength indicator

This has not stopped SEOmoz.org from trying. They are now presenting a new “Page Strength Indicator” based on the following measures:

• Links pointing to full URL (Yahoo)
• Links pointing to domain (Yahoo)
• Position for first four words of title tag on target URL (Google)
• Age of Domain
• Links from domains with .edu TLDs (Yahoo)
• Links from domains with .gov TLDs (Yahoo)
• Alexa Rank
• Domain name visibility (Google)
• Internal Link Percent
• Number of search results for URL search at del.icio.us
• Listings in DMOZ (ODP)
• Links found in Wikipedia
• Google Pagerank of full URL and Domain

Now, this is an interesting list in its own right, as it gives you an indication of what search engine marketing professionals believe are important factors for good search engine rankings.

Legendary status

The page rank of Pandia is calculated to have a rank of 8.5 out of 10, which according to SEOmoz means that we are “Among the most popular and important sites/pages on the web; you’ve achieved near legendary status.”

This is, of course, very encouraging for us, but is probably taking it a little bit to far. It might be that the domain age factor and the DMOZ links have a too big effect in our case.

Nevertheless, this seems to be a useful tool for measuring the popularity of a web site.

This is what SEOmoz says about its tool:

SEOmoz’s Page Strength tool is intended to serve as an alternative to Google’s PageRank score in the toolbar, offering insight into how valuable, important and popular a site or page is as compared to others on the web. If a particular page is on a very popular domain, it may be considered more important than if it’s on a domain that doesn’t receive much attention and, likewise, the homepage (or root URL) of a domain will often be considerably more popular/important than an internal page buried deep in the site’s architecture. In many cases, data may not be entirely accurate, as the search engines and other sources that provide information fluctuate.

Thanks to Andy Beal for making us aware of this one.