Finding Related Sites
I have talked about the importance of finding related sites when it comes to buying online advertising, doing niche research, and for finding additional forums that might not be SEO friendly. So today I figured I would offer a comprehensive list to finding similar sites.
Related Modifier
If you search for "related:(domain)" Google will compile a list of sites similar to the one you have already found. This list is compiled by comparing links on pages that also link to the specified page. Some factors in the popularity of the pages containing the links, what position the links are in, sizes, and proximity to the link to the site you are searching for. You can also use this related modifier at Yahoo.
If you enter a domain into Google Trends you will see "Also visited" with ten other sites similar to the one you are looking at.
Amazon's Alexa Toolbar gathers information on it's users. While it's imperfections have been noted on trying to compare traffic of two different sites, it can be a pretty good tool to find related sites. Enter a domain name and then go to "Related Links" and see ten additional sites that visitors have gone to.
A bookmark syncing service that keeps combines your bookmarks from different computers and on different browers, storing them in the cloud. This is also a good way to compare similar sites, seeing what is being bookmarked with the site you are looking at.
Similar Sites uses a Firefox toolbar to monitor users browsing history to improve their results and understand trends.
Another site that gets their information through a Firefox Add-on. The only way to see the results are if you install the it and do a search.
The claim is they take "over 130,000,000 instances of people manually organizing and describing websites and combines this with sophisticated matching and clustering technology." There are also tags under the site so you can search by a tag similarity. It also features two bars for determining similarity and popularity.
There you have it. Seven different ways to find similar sites quickly and easily. Happy searching!