Back in June of 2008 I introduced a site on this blog called Website Grader. Basically what the site will do is review your site, which can be a blog, give you a ranking of some sort, then tell you some things about it that you probably didn’t know to give you the opportunity to improve, if you’re so inclined.
When I did this back then, my rank came out at 84; as you can see, it’s ranked much higher now, and that’s out of 100 so I’m not complaining one bit. It adds that I’m ranked #32,194 out of 3,127,474 websites it’s reviewed; I’ll take that, as it puts me around the top 1%.
The weird part is that it ranks this site as a blog differently, since it is a blog. My ranking there is only 74, which is weird. That must be a new statistic, since I didn’t catalog anything like that in the past. It says I have 1,870 Google indexed pages, which is weird since I only have a bit more than 900 posts, and not tons of pages either. It’s telling me I’m missing out on some SEO because I haven’t put anything in my ALT tags, which is probably true. It says I have 14,206 inbound links, which is pretty neat because back then I only had 837.
And it shows me as having a MOZ rank of 5. I had no idea what that was, so I clicked on the link it provided and it took me to a page called seamoz, where I found a page of all their ranking factors that gives you a rank of something out of 10, like Google page rank. It seems that have all sorts of tools you can play with as well; if you’re interested, take a look around.
It tells you a lot of other stuff as well, but I’m not getting into all of that. I will say that Website Grader will tell you some things that you might want to address if you want your blog being seen in a better light. Or not, since it told me I have too many images on this site, and I’m keeping them! lol For kicks and giggles, go ahead and pop your website’s link in and see what it has to say. And trust me, it has some funny things to say to you while you’re waiting for your results.
Wow, that was fascinating. What a useful tool – thanks for sharing Mitch. I’ve got some work to do now.
No problem Mike. I’m surprised you hadn’t heard of it already since you seem to be everywhere. 🙂
Did my comment get posted?
My last comment didn’t go through. I wonder if it went in your spam folder.
Hi Mitch,
It’s interesting that almost any website I tested it gave them a 99/100 grade. Pretty strange, if you ask me.
I bumped into this tool some time ago but I forgot about it pretty quickly.
And in all honesty I don’t find it that useful, but it’s free so that compensates for everything 😀
Maybe the sites you’re looking at are better than the norm, Alex, because one of my other sites only came in at 84.
@mitch It’s one I missed, I guess!
@alex I found where it pointed out that descriptions and meta tags were missing on some pages useful, and I was able to do a comparison with the direct competitor for my travel blog.
I don’t think this posted, so I’ll try it again:
I had a look at absurd old bird on this, out of fun (not much point to do it for serious reasons as I’m not google-search friendly now, so they can only show from when I was (though it’s not that long ago that I closed it to search engines). It made me laugh. Apparently my blog is suitable for primary and elementary school readers. However… I kind of agree with Alex above because, unless I’m missing something, my small-time blog has a 91/100 website grade. I suspect a bit of hype going on, so maybe don’t take it all too seriously, eh?
Have you looked at your blog on Yahoo’s Site Explorer? That currently gives you 3,396 pages and 14,801 inlinks. If Website grader works similarly to Site Explorer then the thing about the pages is that they’re not all actual posts or pages, they are tags and categories as well.
In case you’re wondering why I use Site Explorer, if I don’t have a commercially-orientated blog, I find it useful to discover new bloggers via people whose blogs I already enjoy. 🙂
Val, your comment went to the spam filter because you didn’t close the HTML tag properly, so it came through as two paragraphs of a link. lol
Your site would have a 91 rank because you’re using the WordPress software, which actually takes care of a lot of things that you’d otherwise have to do manually. For me, it’s more important for my other sites than for my blogs for this very reason, since I write all my own code.
I have been to Yahoo’s Site Explorer here and there; it will give more information than using Google’s function.
Interesting. My blog received a grade of 87 when I used Website Grader, but the results for the same blog using Blog Grader http://blog.grader.com was only 33. I suspect they are trying to sell hosting space as my blog is getting downgraded for being on a free site (tumblr.com).
Val, thanks for the tip on Yahoo Site Explorer. I’ll give that a try too.
See now Joanne, I’d never heard of that site, so I had to go check it out. I came in at 90, which isn’t bad. Funny that it says my posts aren’t long enough. lol Thanks for sharing this site.
It is very interesting tool, I just checked one of my latest project and it shows 96 site grade and actually I see many things that can be improved, for example, the blog and the website are currently disjointed – there is a link from blog to website, but not a link from website to blog. As well the tweetergrader seems to be useful too.
Have fun with it, Carl; it will show you some things that maybe you can address, as you’ve seen.
I had tried Website grader about 4 months ago and I ad an 81 now I have a 98. My Twitter grade then was 25 and now it’s a 95. It says that my blog grade is 35. I also tried the Blog Grader and it used to be 75 and now it’s 78. I never took this site seriously because the are both run by HubSpot but seem to give out different scores on either sites for the same thing. But it does point out some useful things such as not enough images or too many H1 tags, etc that could be useful.
Karen, that’s actually the best type of thing with these sites. It’s not the ranking as much as something a report they give you might point out that you hadn’t considered before.
Allan, if I can find something to share with folks, I’m going to do it. Have fun!
Thanks for sharing this, Mitch. I used this before but forgot to check back for updates. I am not sure if everything here is useful though, but I still appreciate your pointing this out. The results that come out looks absolutely gratifying. 🙂
– Wes –
Thanks Wes. Be sure to take a look at what Joanne shared as well.
I did look into the site Joanne shared and the results there kind of flummoxed me and made me think long and hard. Suffice it to say that i am kind of confused right now.
Was it worse, Wes, or better? They look for different stuff, that’s for sure. My results, for instance, said I needed to add a way for people to retweet my posts. Obviously it’s not set up to look for Topsy, which I have available to retweet my posts.
I got a grade of 92 in Blog Grader as opposed to 96 in Website Grader. But, yeah, they really are looking for different things, that I can agree with you. Because while I have a traffic rank of 3 point something in Website Grader, I got N/A in Blog Grader. It is also saying that I need Facebook and Twitter subscription, when I distinctly remember having them on my web pages. Oh, well… 😀
Dennis, that type of things makes no sense to me either. Still, it does give you some things to look at here and there.
Mitch,
I started using it since 2008 after reading your old post and I still use it once in a while 🙂 I have been doing good there but after they introduced the social media (esp twitter) weightage, I have been degraded.
Ajith, that is an odd one, but it seems I overcame in despite the fact that I don’t use the program they think I should be using for Twitter.