IZEA RealRanks Launched
IZEA has opened up their IZEA RealRanks page to the general public today. The main element of the tracking service is RealRank, which is “the first site ranking service that focuses exclusively on measuring the traffic and influence of individual blogs throughout the blogosphere. RealRank aims to replace historically unreliable influence indicators such as Google PageRank, Alexa and Comscore by providing more accurate statistical data collected directly from the source.”
More information can be found on their official blog announcement.
The Formula
A great factor in the way they are handling the algorithm is letting people know exactly what is being ranked, even if it isn’t the best way to evaluate a blog.
- 70% weighted towards visitors per day
- 20% weighted towards amount of ACTIVE inbound links per day
- 10% weighted towards pageviews per day
Yes, the weight towards visitors per day is way too high. Smaller blogs won’t be able to ever appear in the ‘top 100′ as always, and by ‘active’ inbound links, they probably are referring to links clicked on fairly frequently, which many smaller blogs won’t attain either. Anyway you look at the system, there are flaws and serious improvements that need to be addressed.
The Positives
An API key is available to allow developers to pull the statistics provided through RealRank on their own site – providing an option if anyone would want to permanently display the graphs.
The interface is very neat, organized, and is makes it easy to login and manage your account. A 300×250 ad being served on the right side isn’t differentiated from the rest of the images – probably creating a higher ROI on their side, however it makes the two graphics below (linking to a contest and a feedback page) appear out of place. How the ranking system works and adding it to your blog is also outlined extremely clearly. An additional positive element to note is that blogs displayed on the front page on the graph are generated randomly, giving even the smallest blog a chance to be noticed.
Downloading chart (.csv) files couldn’t be made simpler, with a two button process. Detailed (not just a rough estimate) is displayed for each day that the tracking code was present.
The site will get better with news of more features coming in the upcoming month:
ROIRank is another IZEA ranking system that will be launched in January 2008. ROIRank looks at the return on investment advertisers can expect to achieve on a given blog. Look for more information about ROIRank after launches.
Are you the owner of a popular blog (currently above 7,500 daily unique visitors)? Consider joining the site for a chance to win $1,000 during the month of February simply by joining and participating in the Alpha launch of RealRank. One winner will be chosen each week with four total winners. View contest rules here.
Comparisons with the Giants
In comparison to PageRank, they state that RealRank does a better job of determining the quality of sites by not only using the number of links to the site as well as the amount of traffic to the site. Plus, because their services (Pay Per Post) was hit hard by the Google Page Rank update last year, they reference the Google algorithm has “having manual overrides and some cloudy rules”.
Further, Alexa Rank is shown to be inaccurate and ComScore doesn’t cater to smaller sites, or else the web as a whole.
The Goals and Problems
IZEA Ranks’ goal is to change the way ranks are created by only allowing blogs to be listed. It determines how your blog ranks among other blogs. I currently view this more as a blog directory with the added bonus of having a cool chart allowing your RealRank, page views, and unique visitors available to bloggers and advertisers who want to view them. At this stage, only 100 blogs will be shown within twenty-five different categories.
It will definitely be some time before advertisers choose to solely base the information from this on their advertising rates. Bloggers still need to consider statistics on several services, such as Compete, Technorati, Alexa, etc. as well as adding tracking codes from web metrics providers – Google Analytics, Site Meter, Stat Counter, and so on. Unless a small portion of the millions of blogs takes the system seriously, it won’t likely provide to be a highly valuable resource.
Perhaps bloggers need an application that quickly shows them all the information needed to determine their online ranking – such as the amount of RSS subscribers, PR, Alexa Rank, ComScore, Technorati, etc., and compare them with other sites, which many current tracking sites approach on, but fail to offer.
So, for now, I won’t be adding the tracking script to my blogs until I see that the program has taken off and actually changes the way blogs are ranked. What is your take on the system – the way blogs are ranked, and the lack of key features – such as the lack of factoring in the number of blog subscribers you have?
