RealRank Explained…. Is IZEA In the Right Place at the Right Time?
Yes, bit of a PayPerPost flood on blog this week.
On the PPP Blog Ted Murphy tried to explain the much alluded to RealRank in his post, What is IZEA RealRank™?
The problem with Google PageRank is that it is both self serving and irrelevant to actual traffic and influence. The arbitrary and unpredictable nature of this ranking system has left both bloggers and advertisers longing for accurate statistical data since long before PayPerPost. Unfortunately, there are few options out there when it comes to determining the value of a blog. While sites like Alexa attempt to estimate traffic they are inaccurate and do a terrible job when it comes to blogs with smaller niche audiences.
I we believe we have a solution and that solution is RealRank. RealRank data is gathered from the IZEA Toolkit “ITK” (formerly PPP Tools). It is a piece of javascript that many of you already have and those outside of PPP will be able to get from a separate site without joining PPP or SocialSpark. ITK gathers REAL traffic information, much like your analytics platform and ranks users based on their standing within the network. The formula is relatively simple.
70% weighted towards visitors per day
20% weighted towards amount of ACTIVE inbound links per day
10% weighted towards pageviews per day
We are currently working on implementing RealRank inside of the PPP platform next week. The public site will be up within two weeks. I am excited to be able to finally provide bloggers and advertisers with a measuring stick that actually means something.
Unlike Google, we are open to feedback. We will publish the actual formulas for all to view. If we make any changes over time based on user input you will see what those changes are and why. We hope this becomes the most valuable site measurement tool worldwide and look forward to rolling this out.
Down with PageRank (beats war drum)!
Hate to sound like a broken record on this … getting advertisers to buy the concept of Real Rank will be the challenge. In the past PPP has sold blog posts to advertisers based on Google Page Rank. They have told advertisers to pay more money for higher PR sites and now they are telling them that that number didn’t REALLY mean anything.
Will be a hard sell; however if the numbers are correct- IZEA has 85,000 approved blogs in its system- then they may be able to pull it off. The real test will be if advertisers are happy and get ROI. If the in the past advertisers have used IZEA services solely to buy page rank – and I don’t know what their real motivation are- then RealRank may bomb.
However- the recent move by Google demanding nofollow tags be added to paid links across the board – then the concept of buying and selling Page Rank might really and truly be on its way out (again) and focus will shift toward traffic and targeted traffic (again) and IZEA just might be in the right place at the right time.
Great post, and I agree that Real Rank might be a hard sell to advertisers. But the advertisers that are doing so for SEO benefits should all realize that PR was a poor measuring stick to begin with and that the traffic and rankings are THE way to tell if a site is good to get a link from.
I always do my due diligence when purchasing links and make sure that I check to see if the site I want advertise on has rankings itself and also if the other sites advertising there are getting rankings for their anchor text, I also check the backlinks using Yahoo! Site Explorer to see if the link(s) are showing up in the back links report.
I think that PPP needs to factor the rankings of blogs into the equation. If Google is ranking a site then it means that they like it and will generally like the sits that it links to. Its all about good neighborhoods!
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[...] Stewart’s article, RealRank Explained , on Bigfoot Web marketing says PayPerPost may face a serious challenge in getting advertisers to [...]