What's Your Rank, Little Blog?

What’s Your Rank, Little Blog?

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For years now, Google’s PageRank system of ranking websites has dominated the economic climate of the internet. Almost exclusively, webmasters have designated the price they can command for advertising space on their websites and blogs based on their PageRank, or PR.

The inherent trouble with the PageRank method of rating sites is that it almost completely bases the rank (1 through 10, with 10 being the highest rank) on incoming links to your site. In fact, you can have a blog that is only read by your mother and you best friend, yet is ranked a PR 4 simply due to the fact that you sought out one-way incoming links from other highly ranked websites. You could have asked for those links or paid for those links, but the outcome would be the same.

What Google was not taking into consideration was the actual traffic to a website: page views, unique visitors, etc.

Say an advertiser paid $100 a month to have their banner ad on a Page Rank 5 site that received 100 unique visitors a day. At the same time, they pay $100 a month to a site with no Page Rank, but 1000 unique visitors a day. The odds are that the advertiser will see more click-through traffic and more sales from the site with the higher volume of traffic, especially if it is highly targeted.

It’s simple math.

So, how do we remedy this flawed ranking system?

IZEA recently launched IZEARanks. Their ranking system utilizes a small snippet of javascript that directly collects statistics on actual traffic. That data is then combined with additional counts of live incoming links to determine a rank called RealRank.

Right now, bloggers can go to IZEARanks.com and claim their blogs. In fact, the time is ripe to get into the system. They are giving away $1000 each week in February to the blog with the #1 RealRank. ChaChing! You can use their tools to chart the trends in your own site’s rank, or to compare your site to other sites using the RealRank indicators.