TouchGraph has a free service where you can enter in the address of a dating site (or any site for that matter), and a Java window pops up displaying the site and all sites that link to/from it. The clustering is fascinating, and it’s a lot nicer than pouring over text-only referrer logs.
How a particular site is perceived, it’s status, and popularity becomes quite clear from the nature of the sites linking to it. Yahoo! Personals, for example, tends to link to clusters of other Yahoo! properties. Date.com is all over the place, lots of news organizations, european and asian links, which I suspect are affiliates. True.com has links to Careerbuilder and other dating sites. Match.com didn’t work, perhaps it’s popularity overtaxed the software.
