I just happened to see Andy Beard before I wrote it in the comments and I guess my mind wandered.

Good post regardless and a good topic to discuss as I am interested towsee where all of this goes as well.

I agree on the ability to game this one for the most part. When I saw the basis of the ranking I knew almost immediately how to game it with no real thought process involved. It is even easier to game than Alexa based on those parameters because you don’t even need a special toolbar, or extension to get counted.

That being said, the thing that did interest me most from an advertising perspective is the Social Spark analytics if that is what you want to call it in regards to the clickthrough info. I know there are plenty of programs out there that you can run that data through, but to have it readily available and basically a page, much like Alexa’s, to look at a website’s total stats is appealing to me.

PayPerPost as an SEO tool could be argued that it never really has been. Sure you get relevant links, and the keyword text you want, but at the same time you aren’t necessarily retrieving a blogs PR value with a post there as the post itself is just a PR0, or unranked anyways when it is done. Advertisers were paying for that PR of 3,4,or 5 and you can argue there is value in that, but ultimately it isn’t that much of a difference in regards to where your particular webpage is going to rank if the referring sites homepage PR is what you base the value of your purchase on. I’ve had links from PR8 sites, where the post actually had a PR7 a couple months later and the page it linked to also had over 1500 links to it. That page ranked about 15th in the SERPs for that term, and the page itself only pulled a PR4 before the changes, but eventually dropped to a PR2.

I guess what I’m saying is that PPP has almost always been better as an advertising source as in direct advertising than for the SEO benefit. It just isn’t all that useful for competing on terms unless it is a relatively low competition term in the SERPs. What the real benefit of PPP has always been is in what it is you are trying to market. They have with a very round about estimate about 50,000 bloggers in their system that get to see ever ad opportunity in the system. We can call these bloggers, webmasters if you like and you basically have access just by running an ad to 50,000 webmasters regardless of the other benefits of running a campaign. So if you wanted to run a campaign that targets webmasters you are going to get some pretty solid bvalue just by running a campaign before you even get the posts from it.

Adding on the ROI metric of the click-throughs makes it even more powerful as an advertising tool, but it is NOT a reliable SEO tool IMO, as most seem to feel it is advertised as. IT is advertised as an SEO service to advertisers, but it shouldn’t be. Bloggers aren’t even required to hold the post on their blog more than 30 days. IF I were to want to get some word of mouth out there for some software, or blogging tool, it sure will do the trick though to get me a lot of conversions because I not only get my target audience in the marketplace when I post my ad, the webmasters, but I also get them to write a review of it on a ton of blogs that others will see. When I see that a site has some decent click-through rates as well I may have a winner.

Even if they are “gaming” the RealRank system there is one thing that is for certain. If they use the methods that you, or I would use to game that ranking there is a pretty good chance that my service will get extra exposure to the people that want it as well because they will be using social networking places for the keywords I want.

Thinka bout how a nice Digg, or Stumble works if it gets into the SERPs. Their post is in the SERPs, and ultimately it leads to my product. It isn’t about where their links put ME in the SERPs, but about how many times my product is in the SERPs on other websites in which those sites link to my service. In essence it is spamming the SERPs and getting me traffic indirectly. Blogitive does this VERY well in that they have bloggers link to other blogger who wrote about my product on their site already. So I get more bang for my buck that way as more posts about my product are in the SERPs, ranked higher up because they are also linked to, and all of them eventually lead to me .

ROI – Meaning Return On Investment, for those less informed.

Peace!

It is generally looked on by the SEO community that the primary value of PageRank these days governs how deeply Google will crawl your documents, and how frequently.

Dan Theis (seofaststart.com) also recently explained some of the other ways it can possibly be used to help reduce the amount of processing power is needed to create a subset of documents about a specific term, before other ranking factors are taken into account)

Ultimately a lot of other things are much more important, and the green is such a rough approximation of real values it is worthless. Also, it is always out of date.

The only real value, is the public perception of a site based upon the green, and that is not just advertisers, but also people looking to buy products, or value your opinion.

Peace!

From what I have seen most of your blogs are probably higher traffic than mine

I feel they would be far better off in capitalizing on the values I ended the post with, but with the introduction of RealRank, it will be hard to find someone willing to bet on that actual return value isn’t going to get overshadowed, again.

As for measuring influence, well I guess it remains more of a guessing game than anything, especially for advertisers who are just looking for a quick return. But I do think your last sentence indirectly makes a very profound statement actually – There’s still a lot more room for common sense in this game