What purpose do these sites have? Website Checking Tools?

[crabfoot]

So I'm checking out links into a site and one of the linking sites is down - I go for a look to see if the domain is dropping, I'm a bodysnatcher in that respect! No such luck ...

Whilst investigating that site I find a search result like this one -
www.sitesanalytics.com/site/experienced-people.net
Hmm. That SEO score feature is way off - and the links to "other top sites" along the bottom don't relate in any way I can see. In any case, they only link to results pages for those sites, they don't go out to the sites.

I'm always interested in low grade links providers, so I poke around the site. I find no way to perform a search or input anything. The T&C are more appropriate to an ISP than anything else.
There's a mention at the bottom of the result page - "data provided by serpanalytics.com" . Let's go look at that.

Serpanalytics purports to be selling services. I'm not very impressed by the results I've seen already, so I ignore that aspect, although they offer a free account for one month.
If you are working on your keywords, it takes a month to settle into a service like theirs, then you can make adjustments and see what happens after another month. Too expensive!

So what is here? "Position Tracking" only works when you're signed in. "Additional tools" has three choices, Competitor Research, Keyword Research and SERP Tools.

Competitor Research and Keyword Research appear to function on the back of some peculiar Gargyl Custom Search. I say peculiar because clicking on a link result or two did not lead to the expected outcome in either case. Clicking on a result in Keyword Research (for "acne") took me to another search (for "Insurance"), while the results from Competitor Research just took me back to the top of the page.

The SERP Tools either did nothing for me, or asked me to log in.

So what is this all about?

[Clinton]

It's all about creating large volumes of pages that seem to have original content and capitalising on Google's still mistaken belief that if a site has a large number of pages with unique content then it must be good.

These people get tons of traffic from Google and are often monetised with Adsense. Great business model, I think. All it took them was one afternoon and some scripts. The script visits a domain, collects some info from there, checks WHOIS, Alexa, The Way Back Machine, DMOZ etc., and puts together a page of information about the site.

Sites like AboutUs and Websiteratings are, to me, just MFA junk and I'm surprised they don't get banned.

Sometimes there a value add in the information they put together, often there isn't unless you consider having the Alexa and WHOIS together on one page a useful aggregation of data as with:
ip-address.com
websitevalue.us &
websitelooker.com

Websiteinformer is a slightly smarter version one of the above type as you have to click to get further information which means they are likely saving on their Alexa API credits.

There are some with minor variations - and slightly better than the above - as with Statsie which provides domain names of the site's main IBLs and the Alexa ranks of those linking sites. It also provides the domain names of sites on nearby IPs (Stuffgate provides something similar - sites on nearby Alexa ranks). And there's hostlogr which plots the geographical location of the site's server. The data on many of them needs to be treated with a pinch of salt though. For example, many of them - like urldata.info - get the age of this site wrong.

Some of these reporting tools are more involved and work on compiling useful information such as the heatmaps and similarsites feature of similarsites.com and the pretty graphs and social media footprint provided by wsadirectory.

There are a few that do provide a nice service of consolidating information for you kinda like a Flippa "due diligence" page but you need to know what info is crap and what isn't. For example, markosweb has some useful features like its integration with uptime checking, validation, SEO charts etc., but some complete junk like their estimate of how much the site is worth (this forum is worth $23.5K apparently). Robotex provides various pretty cool IP related checks, SPAM databases checks, lexically similar domain names etc (bestanalytical also does similar domain names - an even longer list - but given their layout it seems to be more SE keyword fodder than a genuine service to visitors)

Hope that list above is worth bookmarking the next time you need to do a neighbourhood IP check, see the physical location of a site's server or do some other esoteric check.

[crabfoot]

That's not the answer I was looking for. I also have a long list of sites that can yield a bit of sensible SEO data, and usually you can get anything from one to ten lowest of the low grade links out from those sites.

I can see that the owners can make a few bob from the SERPanalytics site, one way or the other. What is the raison d'etre of the sitesanalytics thingy?

You can't see links out from it, you can't put anything into it directly. The ads on the reports might pay for the hosting etc. , but that is not going to be big money - you have to be digging deep to find a page from the site in the first place.

I'm familiar with other styles of s(h)ite that exist to provide links for the owner, in and among the weedy links provided for everyone that makes an enquiry. And those "total rubbish" spun to unintelligible autoblog content sites that have historic rank and PR, with links written in invisible ink on every page. You can at least see purpose in those things.

To me, sitesanalytics is an enigma. It would be hard to turn the site into "something of value", but someone has coded it for a purpose. At the moment, I can't see what the sweet sanfairyann that purpose is.

[Clinton]

The purpose could be to get a lot of pages indexed in Google. If some of the information is useless that's fine as long as it's unique and can fool the SEs.

I suspect some of these sites pay a lot more than the hosting fees. That "rubbish" sitesanalytics domain is about 100K in Alexa. That's not bad traffic. It gets possibly half the traffic this forum gets and, with much less reason to hang about, his visitors would click ads to get out. If he keeps going he'll get to where markosweb is - under 1000 in Alexa! That's a serious amount of traffic.