Site Neighbors is nothing to do with who’s sharing your IP as I wrote in my previous check out your neighbours post, but is a site that helps you find your blog’s place on the web.

The premise is quite simple, sign up, add your blog and profile, and then install one of their widgets on your site - you can see mine in my right sidebar below the Alexa widget. Site Neighbors will then track how people arrive on your website, and where they go when they leave, and, by comparing this information to other sites in their system, build up a ‘neighborhood’ of sites similar to yours. You can then view your site’s neighborhood as a list, or in graphical form - here’s mine:

My blog is the one in green, and by mousing over adjacent lots, you can see what sites are in your neighborhood. Other sites are given a different category depending on how closely related to your site they are:

• • In Your Backyard: These neighbors are practically family. They share many interests and likely share friends. Not all websites are likely to ever have many neighbors in this category. After all, the backyard is a little to close for comfort for most.
  • Your Nextdoor Neighbor: This neighbor shares many interests and shares a similar audience with the focal website. You may already know your nextdoor neighbor, but if you don’t, you probably should.
  • On Your Block: In a well represented siteneighbors neighborhood, a majority of the neighbors should fall into this category. These neighbors share many interests but also have a number of divergent interests. This probably describes most blogs on a given blog’s blogroll.
  • Next Block Over: Something about these neighbors is causing similar visitors to visit their site as are visiting the focal website. However, for the most part, these neighbors may not have much in common with the focal website. These are the neighbors you meet on the street or at the occasional neighbor’s cookout. They seem like nice people but for some reason or another you never get around to inviting them over for dinner.
  • In Your Town : These neighbors can hardly be called neighbors. You may run into them while traveling and have a short conversation once you realize you are both from the same town. However, more often than not the relationship ends there since your connection is tenuous.
  • On the Same Planet: Well…you are both breathing, from the same species, and alive at the same time. Your connection with these neighbors is not much better than the general six degrees of separation kind of connection. If the neighborhood of a site is mostly On the Same Planet neighbors, it means that site’s audience does not match up well with any other sites in the siteneighbors database. It could also mean that siteneighbors does not have enough information about that site’s audience to find close neighbors.

The colour codes are also visible within your neighborhood.

If you don’t like the graphical approach, you can choose the list view instead, showing the 10 closest neighbors - here’s the one for Dosh Dosh:

It’s all very easy to navigate, and could be a good way to find new blogs in your niche. No stats are revealed, either to yourself or anyone else, the lists are all generated by their own algorithm, and no ranking is given, except by the relationships shown above.

Should You Move In?

Like all of these kind of sites, they’re not essential, but it’s yet another way to publicise your blog, and could lead you to some good reads. The installation of a widget on your site is not compulsory, but it will decrease the relevancy of the other sites in your neighborhood, as this is how the information is gathered.

One other plus point for Site Neighbors, is that you don’t have to have a blog to join - all sites are welcome, including adult sites, but these are filtered out of other neighborhoods by default, unless you choose to accept them.

Drop In

As I have only just set up my neighborhood, the sites within aren’t hugely relevant, but if you do join why not pop in and add it your favourites, and I’ll do the same for you.

PS: Apologies for the mixed spelling but as I am English, I have spelt everything correctly, except for ‘neighbors’ as this is the actual name of the site. It can get confusing sometimes…..