Backtags provides a new assessment of websites in comparison to traditional traffic analysis and ranking methodologies. Backtags brings in a social component, by determining the interaction of visitors with websites and the “Tags or Keywords” visitors use to describe the content of a particular website.

This is achieved by extracting data from the top leading social bookmarking services on how often individual websites are bookmarked or referenced by users and the descriptions visitors use to describe their perception of the content of a site.

The result is a social popularity index and ranking of currently (Mid July 2007) a few hundred thousand websites with thousands being added each day. Using the Tag search feature you will be able to find the most relevant websites for a particular keyword.

Backtags is an invaluable alternative assessment for surfers, webmasters and advertisers trying to understand their audiences and competitors.

Unlike a few of the other major traffic analysis sites tracking only US data, Backtags can track any website in the world. The social popularity is independent of national borders. All of our current our social bookmarking services use English as the base language; therefore we are biased towards the English speaking population from around the world.

Social bookmarking has become an incredible force for both in internet marketing as well as the general internet world. In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful and “bookmark” these sites for future reference. In most cases these lists are accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags (keywords), or even randomly.

Assigning Tags or Tagging is an act of bookmarking a site or a web-page with one of the available online social bookmarking services and a tag is nothing but a keyword. The difference to traditional bookmarking is that the keywords or tags are “user defined”.

Advantages

All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. This provides for semantically classified tags, which are hard to find with contemporary search engines. Additionally, as people bookmark resources that they find useful, resources that are of more use are bookmarked by more users.

Thus, such a system will "rank" a resource based on its perceived value. This is arguably a more useful metric for end users than other systems which rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it.

Disadvantages

No system is perfect and social bookmarking sites also have their disadvantages:

• no standard set of keywords
• no standard for the structure of tags
• incorrect tags due to spelling errors
• tags can have more than one meaning
• susceptible to corruption and collusion

Although still in its infancy some users have started considering social bookmarking sites as a tool along with other Search Engine Optimisation methods to make their site more visible. The more a web page is submitted and tagged, the more chances it has of being found. Spammers have started bookmarking the same web page multiple times and/or each page of their web site using a lot of popular tags, hence obliging the developers to constantly adjust their security system to overcome abuses.

Our data is updated on an ongoing basis, with a minimum of once per week for the top 100000 sites and less frequently for lower ranked sites. The ranking data and tag data is updated daily including our Top 1000 list of websites.

New domains submitted by our visitors are first placed in a temporary ranking list and are included in the permanent list within 24 hours. All tags associated with new domains will also be included in our permanent database with 24 hours.

Should you ever notice an empty result from any of the bookmarking services then that means that the site has timed out and did not make the data available within the specified time frame. There is no need to be worried as we will automatically fetch the missing results at a later stage and update the ranking accordingly.

Please note: Our database is extremely quick, but it takes time to get the data from the various bookmarking services. Please be patient while we fetch and process the data. It should never take longer than 45 seconds, unless there is some sort of problem. 

The data Backtags gathers provides a new alternative to analyzing websites purely on traffic (Alexa, Compete, Quantcast) and quality of backlinks (Google). Now it is possible to analyze websites based on human reviews, who understand the content of a specific site better than automatic algorithms used by all leading search engines.

The more a particular site is bookmarked with specific keywords or tag the more relevant the site must be, especially if measured across a broad spectrum of Social Bookmarking services.

Advertisers will be in a better position to determine sites to target for their advertising campaigns by identifying the tags visitors use to determine the content of a website and webmasters can check out the competition and identify strengths and weaknesses.

The data is not better or worse than other methodologies. An analysis should never rely on one source of information. Using data from Backtags will complement and provide a better understanding of existing strategies.

Backtags will be including more social bookmarking services in the future provided these new sites add value. There are many online sites to choose from, but with the sites Backtags currently uses we estimate that we cover 80-90% of the market anyway.

Please contact us if you would like to see your social bookmarking site inlcuded in our list. 

Yes. We will be continiously upgrading our site with new valuable features. Check the brief summary on our Roadmap page.

Please let us know if you have any specific requests.