Facebook most visited site in April: Google

New York: Social networking site Facebook has been adjudged as the most visited site on the web in April by a list compiled by search engine Google.

According to the list of top 1,000 websites, Facebook scored more than 540 million unique visitors in April, reaching a whopping 35.20 per cent of the all the Internet consumers.

Besides, the company served 570 billion page views during the month, beating every other site on the web.

Interestingly, Facebook competes with Google's social networking site Orkut. Facebook's other competitors include Linkedin, Myspace and microblogging site Twitter.

"The list excludes adult sites, ad networks, domains that don't have publicly visible content or don't load properly, and certain Google sites," Google said.

Facebook is followed by Internet major Yahoo!, which witnessed about 490 million unique visitors in April. The website recorded 70 billion page views during the month.

In addition, search engine live.com, dictionary and encyclopedia Wikipedia.org, and web portal msn.com have been ranked third, fourth and fifth respectively.

Interestingly, the list did not figure Google's own sites, like Gmail, News, Search, Buzz and YouTube.

The list helps advertisers plan where they may place ads and displays the number of visitors across the globe.

While, sites like eBay.com are quite difficult to measure in terms of their impact globally. For instance, eBay is separately listed to German ebay.de.

Wikipedia and Mozilla are the only two websites in Google's top 10 that do not display advertising.

Several blogging websites have also made into the list, with Blogspot at the seventh place with 230 million visitors and WordPress.com at the 12th position with 120 million unique visitors.

Among news source websites, Cnet.com ranked at 35th, BBC.co.uk at 43rd, CNN at 64th and NYTimes.com was placed at 83rd position.

Other sites on the list are Microsoft (6th), Bing (13th), Adobe (14th), Twitter (18th), Amazon (22nd), eBay (24th), Myspace (26th), Apple (27th), Hotmail (30th) Orkut (45th) and Linkedin (56th).