My Problem With RealRank
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Disclosure: As of this writing, I have blogs ranked 736, 2648, 3283 in RealRank.
By now, anyone reading this post is interested enough in such matters that they already know what RealRank is, and why Izea/PPP has developed it. So, I won’t regurgitate too much.
The formula for RealRank is 70% traffic, 20% incoming links, and 10% pageviews. To their credit, Izea has committed to a transparent formula with RealRank.
In SocialSpark, we’ve been told that PayPerPost will evolve to a true word-of-mouth advertising platform, complete with “nofollow” links to keep Google happy. If so, advertisers will be paying for our Reach rather than our SEO juice.
RealRank Ignores Reach
However, RealRank, the ranking system SocialSpark will be based upon, ignores a significant portion of our Reach; in fact, I would argue that it ignores THE MOST IMPORTANT portion of our Reach - our RSS readers. The RSS readers are the readers that Trust the blogger most, and are most likely to spread the word about a blogger’s review. How can a ranking system designed to provide advertisers with a trusted picture of a blog’s readership ignore what in many cases is the largest portion of daily blog readership?
I have a blog that is not part of the PPP network, where I have ~300 RSS readers. I only average about 40 on-site readers per day. Is a ranking system that ignores ~90% of readership reflective of this blog’s Reach?
RealRank Understates Authority
The second issue I have with RealRank is the issue of incoming links. As I understand it, the only incoming links measured by RealRank are those by blogs with the Izea Tool Kit (ITK) javascript installed. Again, in many cases, the majority of incoming links will be from outside the ITK installed base. Hopefully, this will change over time, so long as RealRank moves to a more relevant rank and becomes an accepted standard with millions of websites participating.
Obviously, I’d like some discussion of the points I raise, especially if I’ve misrepresented RealRank in any way. If so, it was unintentional and I hope to be corrected. I can appreciate the direction Izea has taken with RealRank, weighting traffic much heavier than incoming links, but even so those incoming links need to be measured accurately or removed from the algorithm.
Perhaps replaced with RSS subscribers? 
Popularity: 53% [?]
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Comments
[…] you for visiting. Please consider subscribing to the RSS feed.Shortly after publishing my post about RealRank, Ted Murphy of Izea was kind enough to drop by and […]
As an advertiser, there’s no way I would trust this ranking system. We WANT links to affect SERPs, not just traffic. Nice try Izea, but looking for another solution.
Hi there,
It’s understandable that RealRank is slightly flawed since it’s rather crude in its design. Pagerank was great but it was so secretive and politically motivated. My PR was shot down to 0 for dealing with PPP. I was so scared that all my work to build up a high PR would be in vain. RR was a godsend. It’s true that it doesn’t consider RSS readers, but RSS readers won’t see the popups or banners that actual visitors would so it’s understandable that those hits wouldn’t interest advertisers.
In summary: RR SAVED MY BLOG! lol
(www.StandardDeviations.tk)
Tim,
Thanks for the feedback. This post pushed me over the edge to do a blog post about this subject.
http://urlbrief.com/d31ef4
As far as RSS goes we are looking into a way to do this reliably that isn’t easily gamed. We don’t want to taint our real stats with other numbers.