If I were to ask you: Where do you usually go when looking to read web focused news and social media related stories and tips? The answer would probably be one of three: Mashable, TechCrunch or both!

Just by taking a quick and uneducated look at the graph below, it is easy to clearly assess how TechCrunch and Mashable have been head-to-head on competition for the last year (and more).

But the above figures are available for all and it is not a secret to anyone that those two sites are rough to crack opponents when it comes to dealing with each other! Therefore, I invite you to stay tuned with us while we compare and contrast Mashable and TechCrunch from every possible aspect such as stats, interfaces, content, mistakes and more in a 2 parts review.

Mashable vs. TechCrunch – The Reviews:

Mashable’s Profile:

“Founded in July 2005, Mashable is the world’s largest blog focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Networking news. With more than 5 million monthly page views, Mashable is the most prolific blog reviewing new Web sites and services, publishing breaking news on what’s new on the web.”.

“It’s informative and important for our keeping up with the ongoing changes in networking innovations. its good to be part of the discussion“. By humanette

“Great resource for what’s happening in social media“. By Jeremy Jaramillo

“Very good site. Lots of news about social media. High refresh rate“. By Casper Maltha

TechCrunch’s Profile:

“It all started on July 15 2005 when founder Michael Arrington opened TechCrunch for the first time. His goal with the blog was to be dedicated about profiling and reviewing companies and internet products. By the time the site turned one year, they had 883 posts, 23,713 comments and 65,00 RSS and email subscribers. They also had 3 other partner sites in their network and have had seven guest post writers and he already hired a co-writer to help him, Marshall Kirkpatrick”.

Mashable vs. TechCrunch – The Mixed Stats:

Indexed Pages and Google Page Rank:

Mashable’s Google page rank is 7, while TechCrunch is 8. The number of Yahoo indexed pages for Mashable and TechCruch stand at 1.3m and 470k respectively.

Inbound Links:

Using Yahoo! Site Explorer, we found out that the number of TechCrunch’s inbound links is about 5.7m while Mashable has 3.7m only.

Technorati Blog Rank:

Technorati has gone the TechCrunch way: TechCrunch ranks 2 with 10,839 authority while Mashable is close at 3 with 10,013 authority.

Digg and Delicious:

There are more than 9,719 TechCrunch articles dugg so far as opposed to only 1,109 Mashable articles. Logically then, there are 382 Mashable articles that reached Digg’s first page while TechCrunch has a total of 802 popular stories on Digg.

In Delicious bookmarking, TechCrunch leads Mashable by 33,522 to 20,541 bookmarks.

Mashable dominates Tweets:

As for Twitter, Mashable has a dominating Twitter presence. Besides Tweetmeme, Mashable is the top shared site on Twitter. The number of links to Mashable and TechCrunch in tweets within a month’s period is a clear comparision: from 23/8/2009 – 23/09/2009, Mashable had around 291,406 back-tweets while TechCrunch alone (excluding CrunchBase, MobileCrunch and so on) had around 123,357 backtweets.

Moreover, TechCrunch has around 1,003,240 Twitter followers versus Mashable’s 1,535,953 Twitter followers.

The way we see it, it seems that the TechCrunch site obviously attracts more Diggers to surf it. This could be attributed to the style of the titles posted are more appealing to them. However, Mashable should not feel sad since they still remain to be the “aces of retweets“!

Mashable vs. Techcrunch – The Interface:

Let’s break down the overall interface design and user friendliness for our two competitors’ sites:

As we can see in the figure above, Mashable embraces well organized and equally highly specialized listing and categorizations for the different topics posted as well as the various channels that visitors might be interested in. Furthermore, the advertising is unintrusive and of related nature.

Furthermore, Mashable has the following value-added interface features:

The Blippr ’emotion face’ after brand names; showing on average how do people rate this certain brand name. The “drop here” Meebo feature to drag and drop any image and share the article on social media. The DISQUS-enabled commenting section, which allows Twitter OAuth, Facebook Connect and DISQUS users to leave comments or just anonymous users. Presenting related articles at the bottom of each post is very organized, eye-catching and readable.

As for TechCrunch’s interface, though less cluttered with categories and information, the advertising seems to be more intrusive.

However, TechCrunch has the following value-added interface features:

CrunchBase adds company profiles next to company names with information and reviews about them. The CrunchBase widget at the bottom of posts, providing further information about companies relevant to each article. Comments can be left anonymously or via Facebook Connect login.

To conclude this part, we must acknowledge that although both sites have struggled with the issue of organizing the dozens of categories their posts discuss, both seem to have found a way to make their interface easy to use and understand.

Mashable vs. Techcrunch – The Scams & Mistakes:

Another short research and yet some more interesting results! It seems to me that TechCrunch has been negatively placed in the spot light way more than Mashable, having been accused of information theft, publishing inaccurate news and being too conceited!

The following articles demonstrate my point:

Come back for part 2, tomorrow…

To conclude this part, it is apparent that Techcrunch has more traffic, backlinks and seems to be more trusted by Google. Yet, by the same token, TechCrunch has had some bad PR, less retweets and followers on Twitter, and a ratio of popular Digg posts of just 8.3%, while Mashable has a ratio of 34.4% popular on Digg (dividing the popular by the total submitted to Digg). Therefore, as a result, it seems that TechCrunch masters SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques, while Mashable has a black belt in SMO (Social Media Optimization) techniques.