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TouchGraph is a free tool which I came across a few days ago, that can be used to find the leading website for a certain niche.
The TouchGraph Google Browser reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google’s database of related sites. This tool is only useful if you want to make some research about keywords related to your website and if you have a website that is at least one year old (you won’t get any results for “related:www.yoursite.com” if your website is quite new). This tool is using Google’s “related:” function to display the top websites for certain keyword queries and makes a graph listing the major related websites.

Another interesting application for this tool is that you can see if Google considers your website what it should be:

This online tool maps out interactively all the sites that are related to a website using Google data. This tool can really show you a neighborhood. When you put your website name into this, it will visually display the sites that are related to yours. If you are a website about cats, but all your related sites are about online poker, then you know you have a problem. Your cat website should be interconnected with “cat” neighborhoods, not “real estate”, “viagra”, or other such unrelated things.

If you are running a Web Directory but the tool shows that many of your “related” sites have nothing to do with a Web Directory, than you should consider optimzing it and get some related quality links because Google could penalize you because of unrelated links. Many unrelated websites that Google considers related to yours, are called a “bad neighborhood” which is actually a group of inter-linked websites that are not related to yours or not following the Google webmaster guidelines.

This tool is great to see who is the leader for a certain keyword, but don’t play to much with it…it’s addicting.