Pinterest is hot. Very hot. Incredibly amazingly hot. How hot? Top 30 websites hot. According to new stats, the virtual pinboard makes no stops on its way to become one of the most popular social networking sites next to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (it probably already surpassed Google+).

The research firm Experian Hitwise ‏has released couple of Tweets yesterday revealing some astonishing statistics about Pinterest growth for the last couple of months or so:

• Pinterest traffic jumped by 36 percent between January 12th to February 12th.
• Pinterest had above 103 million visitors from the U.S. alone at that period.
• Pinterest total page views rose by 21 percent on the U.S. alone between January 12th to February 12th.
• Pinterest now ranks among the top 30 high page views websites in the U.S.

These stats are even more impressive when considering that just one and a half months ago Pinterest only scratched the 60th place of the top U.S. websites. To investigate and verify these findings, let’s compare Pinterest’s Alexa rank back then with today’s rank.

On January 24th it had an Alexa rank of 142 (prior three months aggregation). Well, this is how Pinterest performed for the last six months until today according to Alexa:

Today, Pinterest’s worldwide Alexa rank is already 62 (last three months aggregation)! Even if Alexa data are inaccurate, there isn’t any possibility to deny the incredible growth rate Pinterest is enjoying from.

The site’s growth rate is simply breathtaking. I never seen such ascending charts for a web-based company (not even for Facebook or Google) and the only technology company I can compare it to is Apple (relax, in terms of growth, not revenue).

But Pinterest growth doesn’t only benefit the social networking site itself. Two months ago I talked about that Pinterest became my biggest source of referral traffic (not search engines). Well, since than it remained a major source of referral traffic, although Facebook and Twitter surpassed it again.

Pinterest isn’t just a major source of referral traffic for me. According to a recent report by Shareaholic which gathered data from 200K publishers that attracts more than 270 million unique monthly visitors, Pinterest is sending more and more traffic to external websites.

In fact, in February it already sent more visitors to external websites than Twitter did… Pinterest’s share of visits to all websites was 1.05%, a jump of 23.5% from January. Twitter’s share of visits declined to 0.82% (drop of 9.3% from January).

If you asked, Google+ share of traffic was only 0.05%, which reinforce the low engagement report from two weeks ago. Maybe they should buy Pinterest to improve this?