How useful are the EPA websites?

[Mike Meuser <meuser@mapcruzin.com>]

Hi - I'm wondering if there are stats available that indicate
how many folks visit the various EPA websites.  This is 
probably pretty easy to determine.  I did a little informal
resarch at http://www.websmostlinked.com/ and came up with the
following:
http://www.epa.gov is ranked 146 of 973205 sites
http://www.rtk.net is ranked 9442 of 973205 sites
http://www.mapcruzin.com is ranked 37901 of 973205 sites
http://www.scorecard.org is ranked 400847 of 973205 sites

Now this is a ranking of a website with respect to the number of
other websites that have links to it.  I wonder if these is a
correlation between link ranking an number of hits on the sites or
usefullness of the site? EPA is well within the top 1%, RTK Net is
a solid 1%, My site is within the top 4% (and most of these are
hits on my free download pages or various toxic data and mapping
related pages), Scorecard is ranked in around the top 40%.  I get
around 2,000 unique visitors and 6,000 page views/downloads per
day. I get few comments like I can't find such and such on your
site.  More frequently (about 100 per month) I get pleas for help
from folks that have been to EPA, sent emails, done all they can
and have hit one brick wall after another.  I help where I can,
but since I'm a "one man show", I send many of these folks to RTK
Net or Scorecard -- most are pleased with what they find there.
Does anyone have stats on the other sites?  I'm not sure if this
would be helpful to know.  But it may be a start at figuring out
how useful the EPA websites are.  Do folks find what they are
looking for?  Or do they hunt around, creating numerous hits and
then give up.  We need some real measure of the the good the EPA
website provides to society.  It is provided by public money and
should have as its highest priority and measure of legitimacy, the
good it provides to citizens.  How can we begin to measure this?