RealRank: a ‘real’ alternative to PageRank?

Many of the Payperpost bloggers are now shouting about their REALRankings that went live today. In fact, I was quite pleased to get my ranking at 877 (less is better)… I’ve enclosed the edited graphic to show what it looks like in my screen.

RealRank

As you can see, Payperpost is now using four or five different metrics to evaluate bloggers and their bloggings. It’s quite a challenging system to navigate. Without blowing my own trumpet (toot! toot!), the only fly in my blogging ointment is the new PR ranking that I have. It seems that for the time being Payperpost have ‘frozen’ Google rankings, before the PPP networks were zeroed last week.

I would imagine that in future developments, Google’s proprietary rank will just be skipped in favor of their own metric.

So what is RealRank?

It is a metric derived from three sources in varying proportions: 70% – unique visitors, 20% – linkings, and 10% – page views. Perhaps it is the ability to track how many unique visitors the website gets every day that should make this a much accurate measure than either Alexa or Compete.

Then the totals are ranked from highest performing to lowest performing, with each blog from the highest performing blog gaining a score in increments of 1. So the top site in 1,000 will be #1, but the bottom will be #1000.

The total number of sites will be divided into ten market ‘segments’ with the top ranking of 1 being the top ten percent of sites. This should help advertisers to target higher traffic blogs. It seems that InvestorBlogger is doing quite well as it is currently placed in the top 10% of blogs… but we won’t see accurate placement for quite a while, as the number of sites indexed is currently quite small.

The other odd thing about RealRank is that it will be updated daily at 2am, so sites are likely to see rapid swings if individual posts attract a lot of hits from Digg or StumbeUpon or elsewhere in the Social Media World. In other words, it’s dynamic, unlike Google’s PR which changes irregularly.

How will it develop?

Right now, the only websites and blogs that are included in the system are the 80,000 blogs that are listed in Payperpost’s system. Moreover, there is no external system for viewing stats except for those who are involved with Payperpost. But this will soon change as SocialSpark.com opens up early next year.

In fact, for advertisers, bloggers and so on, the new system will involve considerable similarities with Alexa, PageRank, MyBlogLog, and a lot of other social media websites COMBINED. This will be quite a development. But it will take time to work out the kinks, open the system to outsiders, and fully build out all the features that are being discussed. Here’s hoping… 😀

When Google got rid of the Spammers, I remained silent…

When Google got rid of the Spammers,
I didn’t object; I wasn’t a Spammer.

When they threw out the affiliate marketers,
I breathed a sigh of relief; I was not an affiliate marketer.

When they ‘zeroed’ in on the Text Linkers,
I thought it was okay; I didn’t use Text Links.

When they went after the PPP Posties,
I was glad; I wasn’t a postie.

When they removed the ‘Do_Follow’ers,
I double checked my links; I used a ‘no_follow.’

When they banned my blogspot blog,
there was no way to appeal.

Editorial: Readers, we live in a digital age, and with the increasing amount of control that is being exercised ‘for our good’ on the Internet and Media in general, I felt it appropriate to ‘borrow’ the basic poem to highlight how the Internet is becoming not a place of freedom, opportunity and enlightenment; but rather a place where the will of a few (without legal basis) can be exerted for economic reasons on the people who ‘use’ the Internet daily, yet there is little oversight, control or democracy on those very entities other than market forces. Is this what we want? How much will our rights have to be diminished before we make the Internet a constitutionally protected area?


*This poem is written ‘after’ the original composed by Pastor Martin Niemoller (1892 -1984) in response to the continuing NAZI pogroms of the 1930’s, and expresses his frustration that so few people realized what was going on. It in no way diminishes the suffering experienced by the various groups of people who were savagely discriminated against by the NAZIs. There have since been a number of variations written and published in many countries. For those who suffered mightily in World War I, the 1930’s (In Asia and In Europe) and World War II, let us not forget their suffering. But be reminded that if we make the same mistakes again, that their suffering will have been for nothing.

Is Google Treating All Bloggers Equally… Oh, really?

I was following an interesting thread about TechCrunch, and Michael Arrington’s discussion when I began to wonder: does TechCrunch really use no_follow in his tags? True enough, he does, sometimes. But then I looked at one post which you can find here.

TechCrunchSponsors

And I couldn’t find a no_follow anywhere in this segment. Yet each link is outbound to a sponsor… So the obvious has to be asked: Is TechCrunch passing page rank? It looks like it…

<ul>
<li><ahref=”http://www.pageflakes.com/community/?source= 34d267a2-990a-4b76-bc35-324e790b56d2″ onclick=”javascript:urchinTracker (‘/outbound/www.pageflakes.com’);”>PageFlakes</a></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href=”http://www.idrive.com” onclick=”javascript:urchinTracker (‘/outbound/www.idrive.com’);”>IDrive</a></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href=”http://www.ourstage.com/go/tc” onclick=”javascript:urchinTracker (‘/outbound/www.ourstage.com’);”>OurStage</a></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><ahref=”http://www.wildapricot.com/?utm_campaign= TC&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=techcrunch.com&utm_content =MM20_GYSB”?utm_campaign=”TC&utm_medium=referral&utm_source =techcrunch.com&utm_content=MM20_GYSB” onclick=”javascript:urchinTracker  (‘/outbound/www.wildapricot.com’);”>Wild Apricot</a></li>
</ul>
<ul><li><ahref=”http://www.operamini.com/?source=techcrunch” onclick=”javascript:urchinTracker (‘/outbound/www.operamini.com’);”>Opera</a></li>
</ul>
<ul>< br><li><ahref=”http://www.filitrac.com/Click.aspx?fltrid=  JCDQ8A%2fUGD%2bz2SFhEapgkjHX%2feNtLHx4VayaKBei1pw%3d&sid =tech+crunch+home” onclick=”javascript:urchinTracker (‘/outbound/www.filitrac.com’);”>Text Link Ads</a></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><ahref=”http://www.ads-click.com/blogger.html?utm_source= techcrunch&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign= promo%2Bwidget%2Bblogger” onclick=”javascript:urchinTracker (‘/outbound/www.ads-click.com’);”>Ads-Click</a></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href=”http://www.leweb3.com/leweb3/2007/08/index.html” onclick=”javascript:urchinTracker (‘/outbound/www.leweb3.com’);”>Le Web3</a></li>
</ul>
<p>And thanks to <a href=”http://www.mediatemple.net” onclick=”javascript:urchinTracker (‘/outbound/www.mediatemple.net’);”>Media Temple</a> who handles our hosting.</p>

(ed: spaces edited to make the width better) Then Andy Beard set me thinking:

http://andybeard.eu/2007/11/wrong-reaction-from-techcrunch-on-paid-links.html

…yet many prominent bloggers post quite blatant pagerank passing links to their advertisers every chance they get.

Not only do they mention their advertisers in “Thanks To Our Advertisers” posts, but they also name drop them every chance they get as a form of disclosure.

So, thanks to Matt Coutts page, I found the reporting page on Google and filed a report promptly with the following information:

This website is blatantly abusing text linking which are paid for by sponsors, and there is no ‘no_follow’ tag in the pages anywhere. Here is a sample from the post with links included but no no_follow tag: etc etc.. Please note the details.. I have already noted, copied and photographed the page for blogging. Naturally, we expect that Google will treat ALL bloggers who don’t use no_follow equally.

It will be very interesting to see what Google does or doesn’t do… And by the way, you can download the html from the page yourself before it is changed.

While I’m not so worried about TechCrunch passing PR, I am wondering: “Does Google treat all bloggers equally? Or just some? Over to you Matt.”

[ed. some wording clarified]