The Fate of Tyrlon and other Dubious Things

As you know from some of my previous blog posts, i’m fairly interested in how the whole system of Search Engine Optimization works and how it ties into Google’s illustrious PageRank algorithm. The PageRank of my site is currently only a 1, but I expect that to go up the next time they do a PageRank update which only occurs once every month or two.

Last fall Google deployed a PageRank smack targeted at sites that had paid links on them. This took the form of punishing most all of the PayPerPost.Com bloggers, as well as others who were just running TextLinkAds. Andy Beard blogged about it over here. I discussed some of Google’s reasoning in my blog post on No Follow links and if you haven’t read that post I encourage you to do so.

Now, i’ll quickly explain what PayPerPost is and how it works and then get back to discussing the topic of this post, RealRank. PayPerPost is a company who came up with the idea that hundreds of thousands of bloggers have a large impact on creating “buzz” about a product and can also help with Search Engine Optimization tactics in a useful way. Let’s say you are a PayPerPost (referred to as PPP from now on) advertiser and you want to hype a new product that you have. What you do is sign up to advertise with PPP and then create an “opp” for the Bloggers. It could be something as simple as “Discuss the product found on this page (link to it) and give you opinions about it. Please link to this page or this page during your post which needs to be at least 300 words long.” For that post each blogger may get paid $5-$250 depending on the difficulty, their site’s PageRank or Alexa Toolbar rank etc. PPP allows for a massive amount of segmentation in creating opportunities, so that an advertiser can hone in on the target audience they want. The issue is that for the majority of the advertisers, they don’t really expect to drive a ton of traffic to that product or site, what they want is search engine optimization. Since the advertiser can ask for a particular anchor text on that link, not only do they get PageRank juice from the hundreds of links back to their site, but they also get a small (or large depending on how much they are willing to pay!) Google Bomb.

Now that i’ve explained what PPP does, i’ll explain the issue relating to PageRank. Google knows that there are hundreds of thousands of sites doing this, either through PPP or some other paid blogging service or even just sites that have sponsored links and banner ads. Google knows how to ignore banner ads pretty well and doesn’t give PageRank from a site to the banner links. PageRank relies on links as a way to determine when a site with say PR5 trusts the site they are linking to that has a PR of 1. This results in the linked to site receiving a boost in their PageRank. When these links are sponsored, Google feels that this is detrimental to their search results since it doesn’t show trust, merely that the person was incentivized to link. Since Google was not happy about this, they smacked a bunch of sites manually and tweaked their algorithm some to try to handle this type of sponsorship. What was interesting is unlike banner ads, instead of just ignoring the PageRank flow, they actually penalized the sites with the links this time around, shooting many of them straight down to PR 0 which means you will be at the very back of search results involving keywords on your website.

RealRank comes in as it is something that IZEA has created to try to be an alternative to Alexa and PageRank for ranking blogs. IZEA are the creators of the PayPerPost system and the upcoming SocialSpark.Com as well. RealRank is supposed to be a measure of actual visitors and page views and the algorithm (unlike PageRank) is posted publicly. According to the FAQ, RealRank is calculated as 70% daily unique visitors, 20% active daily inbound links, and 10% daily pageviews. RealRank is currently only for blogging websites and you have to install the IZEA Toolkit (a piece of javascript) to the template for your site so that they can track it. This is similar to the script installed for Google Analytics. So far, my site still has a RealRank of 0 even though I installed the toolkit about 3 days ago. Since the RealRank website was just opened to the public last week, I guess they are still working out some bugs in the system. The experiment i’m referring to is trying out RealRank to see if it can become a true alternative to PageRank in any way. The biggest mark against it is going to be that Google doesn’t care about your RealRank, and thus it won’t affect any search results in the Google search engine. It is possible that some day other search engines may take RealRank into account, and it does give you a relative score compared to other blogs in different categories and how much real traffic you are getting.

Well, that’s about it for this post, hopefully it wasn’t too convoluted and made a little bit of sense! I’m hoping that my site’s realrank will start showing up on the RealRank Website soon.

Edit: Andy Beard made some good points in the comments on this post.

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