Ted warned some time ago that we would soon be starting to filter the traffic IzeaRanks measures. We have just pushed some changes to the IzeaRanks tracking engine live that we are certain will bear fruit in pushing bloggers with good quality traffic to the top of the charts.
Since the first launch of IzeaRanks late in 2007 we’ve continued to monitor the data we collect. We’ve also been analyzing that data to spot trends where people are actively gaming the system. The deployment today builds a great many filters into the tracking system to ignore such traffic. The IzeaRanks tracker now excludes traffic from link farms, bots, traffic exchanges, scripts and a host of other not so nice sources. It’s a first step and over time we’ll be expanding the engine that Tracker uses to identify invalid visitors.
So, this means that from tonight some of you will see a drop in the traffic reported against your site. That drop will grow tomorrow after Tracker has a full day to run.
The formula to calculate an IzeaRank uses weekly moving averages though, so even though people with invalid traffic will see a drop in their actual traffic numbers it’s going to take up to 7 days for that to really ding their IzeaRank itself.
Obviously there are going to be some people upset by this move, but ultimately I believe this is a very positive step forward in terms of building quality and increased accuracy into the IzeaRanks metric.
