I am happy to announce that IZEARanks.com is now live to the general public. At the core of IZEARanks.com is RealRank. RealRank 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.
Why RealRank?
Google PR
Google PageRank is determined based on the combination of an unpublished ranking algorithm (which rates the quality of your site based on the number of other sites linking to it) and some apparently manual overrides to that algorithm’s result. PageRank is not based on real traffic, but on what Google perceives as the quality of a website as determined by a link rating algorithm and some cloudy rules.Thus, I can have a PR of 4 and 1,000 visitor a day or a PR of 4 and 10,000 visitors a day.
Alexa
Alexa Rank uses Alexa toolbar users’ browsing
activity to extrapolate a guess as to a site’s actual traffic, and what
percentage of Internet users are likely to visit it. While Alexa
attempts to estimate traffic based on a sample, they are inaccurate and
do a terrible job when it comes to sites with smaller niche audiences.ComScore
ComScore does an even worse job when it comes to smaller sites. Many bloggers don’t even register at all on ComScores radar. If you aren’t a major media property your blog might as well not exist.
These issues aside the major problem is that all of these ranking sites focus on the web in general, taking into account enormous media properties and groups of sites. Blogs don’t stand a fighting chance. No matter how good your blog is your not going to compete against Yahoo, YouTube or Wikipedia.
IZEARanks.com and RealRank is for blogs only. We don’t want search engines, e-commerce sites,
directories or anything else effecting the RealRank scores. RealRank is
supposed to be a rank relative to other blogs. For that reason we ask
people to flag those sites that aren’t blogs so we can keep the system
clean. We report numbers for all blogs along with the top 100 blogs in a variety of categories.
Advertisers and bloggers alike can use IZEARank.com to evaluate the
RealRank of a blog over time along with pageviews and visitors. You can
compare up to 10 blogs at a time with the graphing tool:
RealRank is Open
Unlike PR the RealRank scoring algorithm is public and open. RealRank is determined by utilizing the following formula:
70% weighted towards visitors per day
20% weighted towards amount of ACTIVE inbound links per day
10% weighted towards pageviews per day
We are also open in providing a public API. The
API will allow developers to pull RealRank, pageviews and visitors for
any blog that participates in the site. I am really excited about this
and I can’t wait to see what people do with it. You can query up to
5000 sites a day with the standard free key, if you need more let us
know what you are up to and we can arrange something.
The most important component to being open is listening to feedback. Do you think we should change the ranking algorithm? Did you find a loop hole in the system? Great! We want to know. This is the Alpha version of the system and we are sure to have room for improvement. We have already gotten some feedback that stumbleupon visits aren’t properly recorded and we are working on that (thank you AndyBeard). I hope there is more feedback over time.
Getting Ranked
Getting ranked is easy. Simply sign up for an account on IZEARanks.com, install the IZEAToolkit and claim your blog.
Separate from PayPerPost
IZEARanks is open to all bloggers and blog. The IZEA Toolkit (ITK)
embed code used for IZEARanks is different than that for PPPTools on
PayPerPost.com. You can choose to replace your PPPTools code with ITK
if you like and your blog will still function in the same way and
report your RealRank. Your PPP Direct badges and AdBubbles will work with either set of code.
A big part of SocialSpark
RealRank and ITK will play a huge role in SocialSpark. If you haven’t already started reporting data I encourage you to do so now.
Why the name IZEARanks?
As the name implies there will be more blog rankings in the future including ROIRank, a ranking system based on the return on investment a blogger provides for an advertiser. The site will grow over time to provide advertisers and bloggers with more detailed data.
