Yesterday sparks light up the web when the guys over at Izea, PayPerPost’s parent company, announced that they would be introducing a new metric to gauge the importance and popularity of any given website called RealRank.
This is obviously a response to Google’s PageRank punishment of those who have been found selling paid post, which incidentally Izea’s core services revolve around. While it is easy to understand the reasoning behind introducing this type of feature in an attempt to step away from relying on Google’s PageRank system, this is not the way to go, and I will be more than happy to explain to you why that is the case.
First, let’s take a look at what this ranking system will be based on. The following is quoted directly from Izea’s announcement of the system:
70% weighted towards visitors per day
20% weighted towards amount of ACTIVE inbound links per day
10% weighted towards pageviews per day
It is, just as they state themselves, a relatively simple formula. Now before we jump to any conclusions, it is imperative that we consider the reasoning behind introducing this system. As it is meant to be a direct competitor to Google PageRank, and considering that the core services of Izea, as mentioned before, revolves around advertising, some obvious conclusions can be drawn.
They have previously used PageRank as a factor when pricing advertisements from any site participating in PayPerPost, and such it is reasonable to believe that Izea RealRank will aim to replace it. The first and most obvious flaw that surfaces is that it does not say anything about the value of an ad at a certain site. The reason PageRank became a powerful metric in the first place, is because it says something about how much authority Google attributes a given site, and therefore indirectly how much authority a link from that certain site will to the site at the other end of that link.
Naturally the RealRank will not give any indication of what benefits you can expect from advertising at a certain website or blog in terms of search engine rankings. Right about now you are probably ready to shout out that this new metric will still give us a good overview of the popularity of a website or blog, and that is certainly a fair point.
Unfortunately however, it is in this case moot. First and foremost because it will simply be too easy to manipulate the numbers. Anyone with $10 to spend per day can simply pay someone to do some social media manipulation which will artificially increase the number of unique visitors per day well into the thousands. Not to mention the possibilites of the numerous amount of traffic exchange programs out there, which will do the same for no cost at all.
The worst part of it all? Nobody can be accused of cheating the system here, because a rank that relies severely on unique visitors is subjected to these fundamental flaws, and that is why RealRank should not and hopefully will not be used by advertisers when shopping for adspace. If the future proves otherwise however, I can assure you that traffic and link exchange programs will get a swift and grand ressurection. Ultimately this would lead to a lot of people making much more money from their websites than they should be, and advertisers throwing their money into black holes of no return.
What is the solution then, you might ask? Well, judging from a post by Andy Beard regarding Izea’s new advertising platform Social Spark, they might actually be heading in the right direction already. Andy explains that this new platform will display current statistics such as CTR (Click Through Rates) for the site or blog to those considering investing in ads at that given site.
This is obviously what buying advertisements should be based on, because when someone wants to buy an ad, they do not do it out of generosity and because they feel a blogger deserves to afford an extra Happy Meal that day. No, they do it because they want to spend money to make more money, and click through rates and conversion rates are what gives a good indication of whether or not this is a likely outcome or not when they buy an ad.
Believe it or not, advertising at a blog with 500 dedicated readers per day can be ten times worth the money compared to advertising at a blog with 5,000 daily readers who do not notice the ads at all. And that is why we need a system that reflects the conversions, rather than another one which is really just based on artifically inflated fluff.
Lars, I look on it it is just another metric, about as accurate as any other, for example Quantcast have fairly accurate metrics for my blog that are openly available, at least as far as page views.
But how to you measure influence?
If one of my stories gets picked up on SELand, that is more influence.
It is strange, my total pageviews per day have actually remained fairly static compared to RSS growth though obviously an upward trend for the last 6 months, yet my reach and influence has probably increased.
Ultimately you are going to end up with a ranking that is similar to other charts, and easily gamed by talking about popular topics.
Hopefully this will be offset by the need for relevant advertising, thus a tech site is not going to try to get coverage on a celebrity blog.
Yes Andy, you completely hit the nail when you say that it is just another metric which is about as accurate (or inaccurate) as the next. Apart from just wanting to point out the flaws in this one, and why it is just as inaccurate as the other ones which are available, I guess the main reason behind this post is to ask why they bother? Why create yet another metric, when it really doesn’t serve any purpose?
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
I do have my doubts about RealRank though I am no expert but just a (an almost ex) PPP postie. I had mentioned this to Ted a few months back during the posties-meet-Ted online chat session. To me, it is going to be the rich get richer, poor will die by the side case. Those of us with high traffic, we will continue to be advertisers’ favourite and those who have little to begin with, are better off with PR (which is mostly zero now). Anyway, I have a few blogs so I will have the first hand chance to test RealRank.
Lilian, you would be surprised.
From what I have seen most of your blogs are probably higher traffic than mine
[...] you need more bad news, you may want to read “RealRank – A Stillborn Idea“. You can view this either way. But I am telling you guys not to place your hopes too high on [...]
I think its good that Google is getting some competition for their page rank system. But as far as this ‘RealRank’ is concerned, it certainly sounds dodgy and maybe not as well thought out as the Page Rank system. My question is, will the ‘RealRank’ increase traffic at all or is it really just designed for advertisers who use Izea? I know that my blog recieves more organic hits now that I have a Page Rank, but will RealRank do the same for your blog?
Peace!
Majik, Toolbar PageRank – that little green bar, has almost no value whatsoever in regards to search results.
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.
Andy, thank you for pointing me in the right direction. I think it is now safe to assume that the increase in organic hits to my blog are not related to Google’s PageRank. I am still new on the ‘blogosphere,’ but I’m glad that there are other bloggers out there that are willing to politely point you in the right direction!
Peace!
Lars, I think they also be implementing what they are calling a ROI Rank. Not quite sure the metrics that will go into the valuation of such a Rank.
ROI – Meaning Return On Investment, for those less informed.
Andy,
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
.
Sorry Lars…I meant to address my comment to you…lol
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.