Why are people still insisting on estimating traffic of other people's sites? Here is a tip: Alexa is rubbish, i.e. wrong. At best, it is a very disturbed reflection of reality.
Also, why does it say "Don't refresh or quit the page until the end of the report generation..." near the top? What happens if I stop half-way through because I didn't see this warning?
I agree with others that suggest website.grader leaves some potentially important analysis off the report. This service is obviously similar, but as much as I like website.grader, I've long thought there is room for improvement, and I think you may be moving in the right direction.
I'm curious what you're doing to populate the "popular pages" section of the site. The site I tried isn't heavily trafficed so maybe that makes it more difficult but those certainly aren't the most popular pages on the site.
Also, may I suggest that you have a native English speaker or experienced writer proofread the "help" copy? (I hope I'm not assuming to much when I guess that the writer is not a native English speaker.) There is a lot of good information there, but some of the entries have spelling or grammatical errors, or are simply awkwardly phrased. For example: "If the Google's cache of the website lack text or links, it means there's a programming problem."
We tried to automated a maximum of Marketing/SEO check. Some are more interesting than others. The most important to us was to give a clean overview so anybody could understand the report.
Also we wanted to provide information about the sources and to give tips to improve any website on the fly.
We will check the spelling/grammar , DMOZ problems , more facts so we can really be more usefull that WebSiteGrader :)
This is very similar to Website Grader, albeit with a bit more information.
Personally if looking to do analysis in any more depth than just a single website overview then SEOBook's Firefox toolbar plugin and MarketSamurai software are much more comprehensive.
They claim that being in the DMOZ directory has high impact, while being in the Yahoo directory has low impact. Does this agree with the experience of fellow HNers?
DMOZ has been and still is a human edited directly making it's links very valuable and trsted to Google. Yahoo!'s web directory was paid at one point, now I don't think it is, but all around it's only worth anything because it's run by Yahoo!. Paid directories, heck most all directories are frowned upon by the Google gods.
Not quite. Google divides paid directories into 2 types: those that guarantee inclusion and those that don't, but still ask a non-refundable fee. Yahoo is the latter, which makes it trusted by Google. There's a video (probably Matt Cutts) where they say exactly what I just said.
Note: I wasn't asking for rationalisations, I was asking for anecdotal evidence. Does anyone have experience in improved rankings that they would attribute to Yahoo or DMOZ?
Just to be clear, Alexa ranks = mostly worthless, edu. backlinks = gold. If you've every done any SEO you'd know that .edu backlinks are the holy grail of link-juice passing backlinks.
Also Alrxa rankings are valuable if you measure relatively against other Alexa ranks.
Also, why does it say "Don't refresh or quit the page until the end of the report generation..." near the top? What happens if I stop half-way through because I didn't see this warning?