How to find related sites or similar websites? What are some reasons you’d want to find websites on the Internet that are similar to your own? If you have a favorite site that you visit often, you might find yourself wishing you could find other sites built around the same topic.
Or you might have a business site and be interested in finding out what your competitor’s sites look like – and who’s just entering your marketing niche. Maybe you want to find a couple dozen websites where you can post comments on a topic that you know well and work at developing back links. Whatever your reasons, there are several good ways you can go about locating websites that cover the same topic as yours.
Though you could just type in a keyword and do a search on the Internet – that will turn up a few sites that might be related to your topic – there are faster and easier ways to quickly locate sites just like yours on the Internet. Here are a few you can try:
Okay, so just about everyone on the Internet has probably used Google at one time or another to search for something – but did you know that you can also use Google to search for sites just like yours? If you key in the word “related:” in front of your search, as in “related:quickonlinetips.com” Google will give you a list of sites that are similar to quickonlinetips.com.
Similar Sites and Similar Web
You might try a couple of “suggestion service” sites like Similar Sites and Similar Web. Both of these services track your surfing habits and offer you a list of sites that are a pretty close match to the sites you already visit frequently. Similar Web is a “smart” service in that it changes its recommendations according to the changes in your interests and surfing habits and also considers your Yahoo, Photobucket, and Flickr visits as well.
Site Next Door
Site Next Door is a search engine, which means it’s free to use like Google only it’s set up specifically to show you related sites. You can locate websites by simply keying them in and visiting them. You can use the site URL or simply use the site topic to do a keyword search.
Links Navigator
Links Navigator is another search engine that lets you browse for sites that are related or similar to your own – but what makes it different and interesting is that there is a small blurb available containing statistics about each website in the database. Statistics include the sites average daily traffic, where most users are located and its average loading time.
Similar Pages
For you Mozilla users, Similar Pages is a Firefox add-on that lets you search for sites similar to yours and returns hundreds of suggestions for each search. Because it’s an add-on, it works in the background and will show you similar pages for any page you go to on the Internet – as you go to them.
If you are serious about finding sites similar to your own, these tools can make your search easier and quicker – and that will leave you even more time for surfing.
Guest author Sonia Mansfield is the content editor for PsPrint. You can follow on Twitter @PsPrint.