2 Great Ways to Check Your Blog Health
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You have a blog and you have been studiously writing useful posts and steadfastly replying to your readers’ comments. You have a good habit of linking to fellow bloggers and get delighted when someone links to you. You have also been working to get your posts to appear in search engines.
All these actions are very commendable and you will be rewarded for your efforts in time. But, it is good to check the overall health of your blog in terms of SEO, backlinks, Google Pagerank, etc. Here are a couple of ways to get a quick overlook of your blog’s health.
Website Grader
Website Grader is very easy to use. You just enter your blog URL, keywords you want to get metrics on and enter a 
competitors website to get a comparison and hit submit. Website Grader crawls the web and gathers all sorts of information about your website and gives you a nice report with some suggestions to implement.
Some of the points, it reports on:
- Score: It gives you a measure based on all the other facts. Useful to compare other sites and yours over time as you implement improvements.
- Score Summary: This section gives you nice overview of stats like Google Pagerank, Alexa Rank, Technorati Rank, Google Inbound Links, Yahoo Inbound Links, Delicious Saved Count, Google Indexed Pages.
- Web Page Structure: Shows your current title, description and Meta keywords in use. Very important for SEO and has a link to a great article to learn more on this topic. Also, looks to see if you utilize Google Analytics.
- Domain Info: Shows you when and whom you registered with and when your domain name is expiring. It’s worth it just for that. Never let your domain name expire.
Plus, it also checks to see if you domain redirect enabled as search engines regard www.shankrila.com and shankrila.com as 2 different websites and you would be diluting your link juice. - Heading and Image Summary: Gives you a good idea about the headings and images a search engine will see in your site.
- Google Indexed Pages: It is pretty important to generate a Sitemap for your blog and submit it to Google so it can index your site. You can also see the pages in Supplemental Index as a high number might indicate duplicate content in your site. WordPress blogs encounter this often as there are more ways to get to post and Google doesn’t know that.
- Search Ranking: You can see how rank for the keywords you were going for if you are in the top 100. Or you will see a ranking of 100+.
- Pro Feature: You get all the above features for free but with a pro account you can compare your previous runs in this site to get a historical data. I think the free service is more than enough for most personal blogs.
For a free service, this tool is excellent and gives you a great overall picture of the health of your blog.
Xinu
Xinu is like Website Grader but it is more focused on providing a quick view of a lot of stats in one page in an easy to read layout. But, it provides fewer recommendations but more metrics than Website Grader.
Xinu was developed by an individual but the source code has been made public for anyone to use. It is available for download and it can be hosted by anyone. One such hosted spot where you can go to use it is Xinu Returns.
Let’s look at some of the metrics Xinu has to offer:
- Diagnosis: This is where you will see a few recommendations on your URL, title, keywords, description, html size, html tags and favicon.
- Domain: Your IP address, online time, author and country information.
- Ranking: Google Pagerank, Technorati Authority and Rank, Alexa and DMOZ ranking.
- Syndication: Shows RSS subscriber numbers, visitors and Bloglines subscribers.
- Social Bookmarks: Shows the number of your pages bookmarked in a few popular social bookmarking services.
- Validations: Shows XHTML, CSS and RSS validations and errors if any.
- Indexed pages: Shows number of pages indexed by Google, Google Images, Yahoo and MSN Live.
- Backlinks: Shows the number of backlinks for your blog as seen by a variety of search engines like Google, Yahoo, Alexa, Live, Technorati, Webcrawler, Clusty, Orange, Lycos, Altavista, AlltheWeb, Ask Jeeves, & HotBot.
As you can see, you can use Xinu alongside Website Grader and get a nice overview of your blog’s health. Writing great posts are essential but it is good to monitor the health of your blog periodically just to make sure you are in the right track.
I hate to repeat this cliche but a blog is like a living plant. You have to nurture it, water it, prune it and take care of it and over time you will reap the fruits of your labor.
I would love to hear your Website Grader scores and any qyestions you may have about increasing your scores and in turn the overall health of your blog.
I write about more technology related topics at ShanKri-la – where technology meets daily life!. My goal is to make your life on the Internet a little bit easier, a little bit manageable and a little bit more enjoyable.
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36 Comments on this post
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Michael said:
Xinu doesn’t seem to be up, I can’t find where you actually use it.
August 20th, 2007 at 10:42 pm -
K-IntheHouse said:
Michael, try Xinu Returns. Thanks for the comment.
August 21st, 2007 at 4:23 am -
Madhur Kapoor said:
I have used Website Grader . A good tool which gives us all the info we need .
August 21st, 2007 at 7:09 am -
chrisblogging.com said:
Website grader looks like a pretty neat tool! I have never used this before, but will be sure to give it a shot…
August 21st, 2007 at 7:25 am -
K-IntheHouse said:
Yes, Madhur!
@Chris.. you should tell us how you like it and what kind of information you found useful for your blog.
August 21st, 2007 at 7:27 am -
Matt said:
Ive used website grader, it helped me with a few things. It told me my redirect wasn’t working lol
great article, putting it on sphinn
August 21st, 2007 at 10:32 am -
K-IntheHouse said:
Matt, I also ran BAYB through Website Grader out of curiosity and saw the Google indexed pages was 0. That was weird.. did you notice that too?
August 21st, 2007 at 11:42 am -
RT Cunningham said:
I got a score of 98. The only red flag was that my domain expires within a year. I wonder if I’d get 99 or 100 if that’s updated.
August 21st, 2007 at 12:54 pm -
K-IntheHouse said:
Wow.. that’s awesome RT!
August 21st, 2007 at 12:56 pm -
RT Cunningham said:
For my next trick, watch how I break the Technorati 10,000 barrier. 🙂
August 21st, 2007 at 1:00 pm -
Matt said:
Yeah I saw that there was “no indexed” pages, but thats impossible. We get pretty good google traffic I know we have like 500 indexed
August 21st, 2007 at 1:04 pm -
Matt said:
I just redid the search we scored 94
Section blogaboutyourblog.com
Website Grade 94
Google Page Rank 4
Alexa Rank 45,066
Technorati Rank 5,597
Google Inbound Links 572
Yahoo Inbound Links 29,606
Delicious Saved Count 20
Google Indexed Pages 650🙂
August 21st, 2007 at 1:10 pm -
Matt said:
and we need about 5 more votes for sphinn =)
August 21st, 2007 at 1:14 pm -
K-IntheHouse said:
That sounds more like it, Matt! I just signed up for Sphinn too.. looks like a nice site! Let’s get this post to the front page today! 🙂
August 21st, 2007 at 2:09 pm -
Missy said:
Thanxs for the tip, i’ve not heard of WG before. I will run my blog through it and check the status of my blogs health. Hope i’m not sickly. I’ll report back what i find.
August 22nd, 2007 at 10:43 am -
K-IntheHouse said:
Missy, you are very welcome. I am just passing along a useful tool.. credit goes to those guys who are serving this for free! I’ll look forward to your findings..
August 22nd, 2007 at 11:33 am -
Missy said:
My Overall Grade is 76 out of 100.
Google Page Rank, 0
Alexa Rank, 334,584
Technorati Rank N/A
Google Inbound Links, 0
Yahoo Inbound Links, 1,272
Delicious Saved Count, N/A
Google Indexed Pages, 47Since this blog is new, it does not have a PR, but it is predicted at 4. And the Technorati Rank, i’m not sure is correct. hmmm. I think overall for a one month old blog, it’s pretty dang healthy. What do you think?
Also on the report it stated about (domain registration) and how it should not be expiring within a year, how important do you think this is to SEO?
August 22nd, 2007 at 5:10 pm -
K-IntheHouse said:
Missy, that’s an incredible fiat for a blog that’s one month old. Technorati has been having some problems lately and I am not surprised at that. Domain expiration seems to be a factor when Google assigns you a PR but I am not sure how much weight it receives though.
It is good to have it registered for a couple of years anyways so you don’t have to remember.
August 23rd, 2007 at 6:47 am -
Dj Flush said:
iBlogStats.com is a tool I designed and publish some weeks ago and its based on the xinu architecture 🙂
You guys must try it out
August 26th, 2007 at 10:55 am -
Jeanne Dininni said:
Matt,
This post is absolutely fantastic! Thanks so much for introducing us to these two great diagnostic tools! They’ve really been helpful!
It’s great to see where our blogs DO stack up, as well as to learn the areas that need improvement, so we can work to correct them!
My Writer’s Notes blog is seven months young, and though it, as yet, has a Google Page Rank of 0, much was encouraging in these two reports! My Website Grader stats are reproduced below:
Section http://www.writersnotes.net
Website Grade 77
Google Page Rank 0
Alexa Rank 850,176
Technorati Rank 61,772
Google Inbound Links 45
Yahoo Inbound Links 10,009
Delicious Saved Count N/A
Google Indexed Pages 494I was amazed to learn that I have 10,009 Yahoo inbound links, according to Website Grader! (Xinu said I have 8,563, which is still great!)
The only thing that threw me was that neither tool was able to find my RSS feed! I’m not sure why. I actually have two feeds currently: my regular RSS feed and my Feedburner feed. It’s a mystery to me. (I was aware, though, from visiting http://www.whois.sc, that some parts of my site aren’t indexable by search engines. Maybe this is one of them? That certainly couldn’t help me earn Google Page Rank any more quickly!)
Oh, by the way, you’ve been stumbled!
Thanks for a great post!
JeanneAugust 26th, 2007 at 4:36 pm -
Jeanne Dininni said:
Matt,
Sorry about placing the comma after the whois URL! I didn’t realize your software would turn it into a link! Unfortunately, the comma became part of the link, and thus, it doesn’t work! Here’s the correct link: http://www.whois.sc/ .
Jeanne
August 26th, 2007 at 4:40 pm -
Jeanne Dininni said:
K-IntheHouse,
Sorry to have made my second faux pas by attributing your wonderful post to Matt! My apologies! All of the above is hereby redirected to K-IntheHouse!
Jeanne
August 26th, 2007 at 4:54 pm -
K-IntheHouse said:
Jeanne, thanks for the kind words. And thanks for taking the time to share your findings. I looked at your blog but couldn’t tell if you are using WordPress. The RSS feed discovery is an important one to look at as that would allow people using the recent browsers to subscribe to your feed easily with one click.
As for Google PageRank, with this PR prediction tool that you will be a PR 5 with the next PR update by Google which could happen any day now.
And thanks for the Stumble! 🙂
August 27th, 2007 at 6:11 am -
K-IntheHouse said:
@DJ Flush, thanks for sharing that with us. I am bookmarking it..
August 27th, 2007 at 6:13 am -
Jeanne Dininni said:
K-IntheHouse,
Thanks so much for that encouraging info about my predicted page rank–and also for that great tool! I really appreciate both!
About my feeds, I’m not sure why the other two analytical tools didn’t detect them, but I have buttons on my blog for subscribing to both my Feedburner feed and my regular RSS feed, and though I don’t have many, I do have subscribers to both. My Feedburner feed is quite new, but several people have subscribed, so far.
Unfortunately, Orble, the blogging platform I use, only offers a partial feed, though they are looking into offering a full feed, at my suggestion. (I guess that answers your question about WordPress!) I suspect that my feed subscriber counts would be higher if Orble offered a full feed.
Thanks so much for your response to my comment! I really appreciate your taking the time to look into my blog’s predicted Google Page Rank! I have to admit, I’ve been wondering where Writer’s Notes would be once the update occurred!
No problem about the Stumble! I love to Stumble great content!
Take care!
JeanneAugust 27th, 2007 at 12:23 pm -
K-IntheHouse said:
I am pretty new to blogging myself and learning new things from fellow bloggers everyday. I am really glad I could help you out.
To me full feed is a must for a new blog. But, you have to work with what you have and hope Orble would add that soon. If not, you have plenty of options around though.
Hope to see your around. 🙂
August 27th, 2007 at 1:00 pm -
Jeanne Dininni said:
K-IntheHouse,
Just wanted to let you know that I’ve written a post about the IWebtool page rank predictor and have linked to you. Here’s the link to my post: http://www.writersnotes.net/predict-your-new-google-page-rank/.
Thanks, again, for your help!
JeanneAugust 27th, 2007 at 3:13 pm -
Armand Rousso said:
we advise to run your blogs through Website Grader which gives an overall health about your blogs ,gathering all sort of information about your website which is so rich and effective.
Armand Rousso
http://internet.armandrousso.biz/August 30th, 2007 at 10:47 am -
Ms. Latina Renee said:
Thank you for the email message. Am I an author here?
September 1st, 2007 at 11:00 am -
Matt said:
no, but you are registered to BAYB
September 1st, 2007 at 11:21 am -
K-IntheHouse said:
@Jeanne.. appreciate the link and you are very welcome!
September 1st, 2007 at 8:45 pm -
Tim Broder said:
Thanks a lot for the tools, I have to change some of my meta tags around now 😉
October 9th, 2007 at 9:19 am -
Dentist Abilene said:
This is a very great thing. We can now check out the status a blog site.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:51 am
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