By now, most bloggers know that a major Internet search company (which I won’t bother naming) went on a rampage a couple months ago, knocking the PageRank of many blogs down to 0. What kind of heinous crime did these bloggers commit to warrant such a penalty? They had the audacity to publish paid reviews and links to commercial websites. Apparently, this sort of thing is only acceptable if you use the search giant’s own advertising network.
A lot of people didn’t think PageRank was a true indication of a website’s worth anyway, and it’s not hard to see why. Link farms and scraper sites are routinely awarded with solid ranks, while blogs with genuine, fresh content get nothing. Obviously, there must be a better way to show how one site compares to another.
IZEA has come up with a solution that sounds promising. They recently launched a tool over at IZEARanks.com that calculates a site’s RealRank based on three different factors. The RealRank algorithm is public, so I can tell you that rankings come from daily unique visitors (which accounts for 70% of the rank), daily active inbound links (20% of the rank), and daily page views (10%).
In order to promote RealRank and get more sites to sign up, IZEARanks.com is giving away $1,000 per week during February to the blog with the #1 RealRank at 11:59 p.m. EST on February 7, 14, 21, and 28. That’s pretty cool, but I have no shot of winning
I think the IZEARanks.com site has some good tools available. I signed up and was able to see a bunch of different graphs and charts with data about my site’s visitors, page views, etc. Now I just have to figure out a way to make use of the data!
Anyway, if you’d like to see how your blog or website stacks up against others, go sign up at IZEARanks.com. It only takes a minute!