help in verifying a Sites Traffic

**Sn00p** · March 13th, 2011, 11:26 AM

What sites do you recommend for checking a competitors stats or verifying a sites traffic if thinking about a purchase.

I just tried statbrain - told me it can take up 60 seconds - 10minutes now still waiting for some results...in the mean time I saw spyfu mentioned here so checked that out, a lot quicker and even gives you organic keywords for the site you are checking. Although I wonder how accurate this is?

Is spyfu to be trusted? any others that you recommend?

**Sn00p** · March 13th, 2011, 11:37 AM

Just found compete.com........seems the best I found so far....can compare a few sites and gives you the search terms used number of referring sites and then some.

p.s statbrain is still open in another tab...still waiting....im now in position 239....great! so much for 60 seconds.....

**hooperman** · March 13th, 2011, 11:59 AM

Some traffic tools were mentioned here. I like SEMRush, but that's the only one I've used regularly.

**Clinton** · March 13th, 2011, 1:32 PM

or verifying a sites traffic if thinking about a purchase

That's a different matter altogether. If you're thinking of buying then you should get access to server logs/ Google Analytics or whatever else they're using.

**Sn00p** · March 13th, 2011, 2:08 PM

What extra data do you get with the server logs/analytics etc? are they more accurate and thus more trusted than using a third party?

**grynge** · March 13th, 2011, 7:01 PM

Originally Posted by Sn00p

What extra data do you get with the server logs/analytics etc? are they more accurate and thus more trusted than using a third party?

Screen Caps and video are easy to fake, live access to logs are a lot harder to fake but they can be manipulated. You really need to verify where the traffic that is coming to the site is coming from. Look for the referrers, and then follow the links to see whats going on.

Do a comparison of ip's vs referrers. If the site has 100 ip's with 40,000 referrers then you know something is not right.

Large amount of traffic via 1 link can mean bought traffic but it can also mean a link on a major site as well. Some large sites also sell traffic so you have to be careful, Stumbleupon, Facebook can be a great way of getting FREE traffic but they also charge for traffic as well.

Check the incoming links. Check the search engine referrers, if the serp is like page 20 and the site is getting 1000 incoming a day then something is amiss. If the site is number 1 on page 1 and the incoming is 1000 a day then look at the keyword, use googles trends to measure the keyword/keyphrase with another similar one and see what is happening.

Also look on flippa for similar sites and check their traffic details as well you should get a feel for what is natural traffic and what is purchased traffic.

**Clinton** · March 18th, 2011, 9:13 AM

Sn00p, all these tools like spyfu are making educated guesses and extrapolating. That's never going to be as good as getting access to the site's real stats (whether it's awstats, GA or something else).

**drepac** · March 29th, 2011, 5:11 PM

@Sn00p, I would ask the seller to give you access to the Google Analytics account and make sure that whatever account the owner gives you access to matches that of the site in question. You can easily do that by looking at the HTML source of one of the site's pages of look for a string that starts with UA-xxx

@Clinton, I have never used spyfu before. How accurate is their claim regarding the keywords used by the competition? and how can they even have access to such info?

**grynge** · March 29th, 2011, 8:55 PM

Originally Posted by drepac

@Sn00p, I would ask the seller to give you access to the Google Analytics account and make sure that whatever account the owner gives you access to matches that of the site in question. You can easily do that by looking at the HTML source of one of the site's pages of look for a string that starts with UA-xxx

@Clinton, I have never used spyfu before. How accurate is their claim regarding the keywords used by the competition? and how can they even have access to such info?

NO ONLINE STATS TOOLS ARE 100% ACCURATE. At best they can give you an overall look at keywords/keyphrases based on how many sites in their dataset, how many keywords/keyphrases they are tracking. Obviously the more statistics they have access to the better the overall picture they can show. They can't for example tell you what position the keyword is in when someone clicks on it, the tracking data only gives the page number so they know it's on page 1/2/3/23 etc.. They can assume from their access to the serp at that time what position it could be in but in Googles example they have many different versions of the serps working on many different countries.

**Clinton** · March 30th, 2011, 3:58 AM

Originally Posted by drepac

How accurate is their claim regarding the keywords used by the competition? and how can they even have access to such info?

On keywords and competition many of these sites are fairly accurate - 70-90% if I had to put a number. It's clever what you can do just with Google searches if you know what you're doing with advanced commands. Stick in an API or two and you increase that power exponentially.