As a website owner, I’m always interested in knowing how many backlinks are currently pointing to my website. Watching the total number of backlinks grow over time allows me to gauge how well (or how poorly) my linkbuilding campaigns are working. Finding accurate backling counts is very difficult and usually involves going to several different websites to get an accurate count for each major search engine. When I came across the Website Popularity software by SubmitSuite, I was excited by the prospect of a windows program that could bring all of this research together in one place.
The amount of information that Website Popularity is able to report is great. The software will show you how many pages of your site are indexed in 5 different search engines and count the backlinks for 8 different search engines. Additionally, it will show you the Alexa rank, Pagerank, and Netcraft rank for each site. For those of you that are fans of the social websites, there is a tab that shows Del.icio.us bookmarks, Diggs, and Reddit mentions. There are several other pieces of information that the program can find for you, but these are the major ones.
So far Website Popularity sounds great, right? Well there is one minor problem….it is incredibly inaccurate! Each time I update the link counts for a website some will work and some will just show zero. Other times, Website Popularity will give you a number, but it is way off the mark. I found these inaccuracies to hold true for just about every piece of information the program reports. Updates are included with your purchase, but they are fairly rare and don’t often add new features to the program.
Presumably, using the built in proxy feature might help increase the accuracy of the counts, but keeping a working proxy list is such a pain it just isn’t worth it. SubmitSuite had a great idea with Website Popularity, but this program has a long way to go before being worth the purchase.
Get more information on Website Popularity here
