Want to know how to get your Website high up in natural search results, but don’t want to pay a search engine optimization (SEO) firm just to find out what you are doing wrong? Now you can get a free, automated evaluation of your site on Website Grader. Just type in your Website address, and it will spit out a report detailing what you can do to boost your site’s SEO juice. It even gives you a grade.
TechCrunch scored a 99 out of 100, but we do have some weak areas. Apparently, we use too many images and not enough metadata. Website Grader found 3,918,184 inbound links to TechCrunch, and 17,500 pages indexed on Google, where we have a PageRank of 7 (out of 10). Blogs by their very nature tend to do well on natural search results, because they are constantly updated and have a lot of links going in and out.
Just for fun, I typed in the WSJ.com and the NYTimes.com to get comparison stats. Both also scored a 99. But, as you’d expect, the NYTimes trounces the WSJ.com (and us) when it comes to PageRank, inbound links, and traffic. That is simply a function of being an open site versus a closed, subscription site like the WSJ.com. Here are the comparison stats:
These figures really show the penalty the WSJ.com is taking by sticking to its subscription wall. Instead of a PageRank of 9 like the NYTimes.com, its PageRank is the same as ours. The traffic rank numbers are from Alexa, so I’d ignore them. The number of WSJ.com pages bookmarked on del.icio.us or indexed by Google is a tiny fraction of what it would be if it was a fully open site. Even if these numbers are not completely accurate, you get a sense of how much a better job the Wall Street Journal could be doing to make its articles visible to the outside world.
Website Grader is operated by HubSpot, a search engine and Web-marketing optimization company hoping to get leads from the site. If you use it, don’t be surprised if you get contacted by one of its sales reps trying to upsell you to one of its paid services. Hey, you didn’t really think it was free, did you?
Erick, the companies name is HubSpot not HubStop (the name in the link is correct, you just spelled the anchor incorrectly).
On the topic of search companies, has anyone seen this new search product ManagedQ? I read on AltSearchEngines it was an Ask.com secret project and then I got an email from a friend raving about it today.
It’s got a really slick UI and uses some type of algorithm to generate a pretty good set of tags on the fly. It’s definitely worth a try.
Anybody here have the juicy details on the company?
This is interesting – but one flaw is that you can only get your analysis if you provide them with an email.
Of course you can now use one of those temporary email addresses
i got it without email
I just tried it and I think email is optional. Sounds like a solid product.
Yeah the email is optional. Its a pretty nice tool and gives some good information. This is one of the nicer and less complicated tools that I have seen.
The Hubspot people are a little eager, to the point of being creepy. They will google you, call you, talk to you about your past, give you free advice…. heck I just want a website grader, not another mom.
“The traffic rank numbers are from Alexa, so I’d ignore them.”
Mike, why so harsh on Alexa? I think Alexa is still more accurate than new services such as compete/quantcast – I use all of them quite a lot for my SEO job
Jason D.
why is apple.com not working?
“I think Alexa is still more accurate than new services such as compete/quantcast”
Not if you install the quantcast javascript – you can’t get much more accurate than mining actual traffic. I think Alexa is horribly wrong – on my site I also have installed a custom javascript that tracks traffic. Each month over the course of a year has shown solid traffic growth, yet I keep sinking further and further down in the Alexa rankings (from 40K to now somewhere in the 300K+ range?). I also use Complete and find those numbers much closer to actual statistics, although none of these sites (Alexa, Compete, etc.) are very helpful at all if you have a site that uses AJAX to any extent.
Looks like you helped bring down this site. “Server is too busy”
I installed Quantcast of two of my sites (all with > 1K uniques/day) and it didn’t even report those numbers correctly. Check out your Quantcast stats in comparison to your webstats and you should see what I’m talking about…
‘Server is too busy’
That was quick!
Wow. In a five-paragraph article about a web site evaluation service, you devoted a whole paragraph (and the longest one at that) to trashing the WSJ’s subscription-only model. You must really hate the WSJ (although logic would suggest if you hate it that much, you wouldn’t want to read it and therefore wouldn’t care that it’s a subscription site).
Your reasoning that the NYT’s higher grade “is simply a function of being an open site versus a closed, subscription site like the WSJ.com,” is specious at best. Perhaps you’ve noticed that the NY Times is 1) a general news publication that appeals to a much larger audience, and 2) the largest newspaper in the largest city in the U.S.
What’s your next comparison: The Economist vs. People?
The power of the crunchies to overload “Server is too busy”
When do you folks go to bed so I can get my gettums?
hahah DNS failure….not ready for prime…
Wow, tried to test on my site and they are out of order. Hit by the TechCrunch effect.
Super Duper Extreme Latency…
Dude, you killed the site!
Oh, it’s working now, yayyy
HubSpot website grader is an excellent tool for a quick analysis of a website and some solid tips on how to make improvements. Its not perfect of course but seo is far from a science – so its all about making tweaks and improvements and the website grader give novices and experts a good place to start.
this thing has been around for a long time….
im getting a Service Unavailable
yeah, service unavailable again.
Sadness fills me.
Scratch that… now I can’t even connect to the server. It’s as if it never existed.
I think we broke it
While this SEO free report may be good for getting beginner’s advice. It won’t replace any SEO consultancy. If you want to rank well in the search results then the number of images on the site or on page factors won’t make a big difference. The biggest factors that affect rankings are incoming links. If you want to get a free report on quality of your incoming links that you can use Link Diagnosis firefox plugin. It’s free as well but does not need providing an email address.
Wow. I guess lots of people really do read Tech Crunch
Sorry. We did fall victim (like many others) to the traffic spike with some short outages. We’re back up now.
Mike Volpe
VP Marketing
HubSpot
ScalabilityGrader.com ?
seomoz.org has a better page strength tool that does not require you to enter your email address: http://www.seom...g/page-strength
Sorry its not working for any site I put in it, starts off well enough but no reports or emails are sent. I love the idea and will give it a go tomorrow when the traffic has died down a bit.
Great tool, working smoothly now. Great to get some infos mashup fast.
Websitegrader is what the SEO industry calls link bait, and you bit the lure and line. The sole intention of these content pieces is to get links, and WG doubles as an email harvester.
Way to go hubspot! Now for an SEO hat trick bait jason calacanis.
I have known this site for some time and I will check it to see if there is anything new there when it becomes available again.
Compete.com’s traffic metrics are much closer to my site’s real traffic than Alexa is. Alexa is all over the map.
Check out Google for ‘free seo tips’, this TC post is already number 6. Google has really been increasing the speed at which they adjust their placements.
Very nice! Of course there are other tools out there but I think this is one that can also be used for garnering traffic metrics
This is great!
I have been freaking out as my startup on Google went from the 1st link to the fourth page – WTH ( for months was listed 1st )? Blog and articles are all seen before then…
@Jason D (#7), my name is Erick, not Mike. These Alexa numbers are obviously wrong. TechCrunch does not have more traffic than the WSJ.com, yet Alexa ranks us higher. If only it were true
@Geoff, I don’t know why you suggest I hate the WSJ. I love it. I think it’s a great paper. But I am not a fan of its subscription wall. it is hurting the business. Look at the discrepancy in the number of pages indexed by Google. That number should be in the tens of thousands, not 34.
I think this websitegrader thing has been around for what — a year already? Hasn’t it already been covered?? Or – what’s new about it?
I just found a report that I ran from this site back in November 2007. This tool is pretty worthless from an SEO standpoint. It doesn’t provide any unique information.
I think it’s a nice free tool that gives some good info. I tried them a number of months back and I don’t recall any aggressive contact activities on their part. The grade makes it easy for users to see where they stand on the areas it tests. People could easily watch results over time. I don’t think anyone is advocating this be the sole test for any site.
I’m not particularly fond of Alexa numbers for the reasons people have stated. As for other services that measure visitors, the numbers can be off based on how and where you implemented their code.
Another good free tool is the one that Google supplies via their Webmaster Tools. They’ve recently enhanced this area to include a “diagnostics” tab which has useful info. It points out info on how Google could or could not crawl your site and if it sees issues with your meta data.
It also looks like the site no longer links to their View Sample report at:
http://www.webs...94/default.aspx
If I clicked the link, I get the following message:
“Sorry, The requested report can not be found, please do not hesitate on creating it again,do not worry about this report results, you can always get your past results with WebsiteGrader.com, but this is only available for registered users.”
very nice ….. love it !
Does the number of del.icio.us links really matter for SEO? Doubt it…
I’m glad someone has finally done something like this! I came up with a similar idea three years ago, registered the domain (a pretty good one!), but then never bothered to move on with it because I had other things to be getting on with. The reception this gets, however, might inspire me to pick it back up
Has anyone tried the websitegrader.com link lately? I’m getting 404 errors and “Service Unavailable” warnings.
lol @ scalabilitygrader.com
Poor service – it’s falling apart – Microsoft technology
Also, it should be renamed to webPAGEgrader, as it rates PAGES, not whole sites (with lots of pages, each of which could be good or bad SEO-wise).
Yep..you are right Otis Gospodnetic. I tried it too to see how better is this above mentioned software to the one I use to generate better results is terms of providing Free SEO Report to our clients.
Thanks
Brilliant idea.
I too had a lot of the backend code ready to do something like this, but never got the UI working.
The site is hosed. “Website Grader by HubSpot – Marketing Reports for 200,000 URLs and Counting…”
Maybe that’s way the report never loads because they are counting
Disclosure: I’m the inventor of WebsiteGrader and a co-founder of the company behind it, HubSpot, Inc.
First off, my apologies for all the folks that have had issues getting to the site recently. We tested extensively (and have had previous spikes in traffic before). But candidly, we’ve never seen anything like the traffic that this TechCrunch article has generated. We’re both enthralled, and humbled by the level of enthusiasm for the tool. If you had trouble getting to the site today, we hope you’ll try again. We’re working (literally) around the clock to serve as many users as possible. The software does a lot of “heavy lifting” trying to come up with the results that it does. I personally think your patience will be rewarded (the results are worth it), but I have a biased opinion.
Secondly, for those questioning why this made it to TechCrunch as “news”: WebsiteGrader has been available for a while (it’s graded 200,000+ websites). However, what’s newsworthy is that this is a brand new “2.0″ release of the software. More work has gone into this version than the original version. We hope that many of you will appreciate the new features in this current release, and our thanks to Erick for giving us some air-time and exposing this free tool to so many people.
Thirdly, WebsiteGrader is (and has always been) a free tool. Though the company behind it is passionate about Internet marketing for small business, we really do want Website Grader to be as useful to as many people as possible. Though an email address is appreciated, it is not required. Well over 99% of the users of the free WebsiteGrader tool will likely never buy anything from HubSpot (the company that created it). We think that’s totally cool, and ok. That’s what makes the Internet a wonderful place.
Fourthly, (if that’s even a word), we’re aware that WebsiteGrader will make a lot of “professional” SEO people uncomfortable. We’re not claiming that the tool can replace the average SEO consultant (although I think it’s true in some cases, we’re still not claiming it). Our goal for the tool is to try and take a lot of the repeat, monotonous work in the SEO industry and automate it. If you’re a *great* SEO consultant, you have nothing to worry about (neither Website Grader nor any tool will ever be able to displace you). If not, then, well, um, our best wishes that you actually become a great SEO consultant.
Website Grader has been created with one driving principle: To help increase transparency in the internet marketing industry. We think this is, fundamentally, a noble cause.
Cheers,
Dharmesh Shah
Chief Architect of WebsiteGrader.com
nicely put Dharmesh, and a great tool as well.
thanks for the clarification darmesh… there are lots of SEO tools out there.
I did try WSG a while back and found that it aggregated a useful slice of
data about my sites. I can’t figure out why it said a PhD reading level was required when there were only about 8 words on the page though!
What I didn’t get from this post that it was a about a new release, or what features in new release are newsworthy (i.e. different enough from the current state of art to warrant wide attention…) any elaboration on that would be useful, otherwise it just reads like an advert for WSG.