Quick RealRank Update

January 13th, 2008 · No Comments

So i’ve been checking the RealRank site every day thinking that they might get around to fixing the RealRank of 0 issue. That is still not the case! If you check RealRank’s site for my RealRank you will see that it is still zero. Since it still isn’t working I put in a support ticket last night to see if they can figure out what is going on. I’m not the only one having issues either if you look at their blog post about RealRank.

Andy commented on my last post about RealRank, but I hopped over to his site and noticed he wrote a pretty extensive article comparing some various tracking measures, you can find it here. I think he comes to the same overall conclusion that I did, new ranking stats don’t matter if those stats are for the benefit of advertisers and they just don’t care. If you check out Andy’s RealRank here, you will see that he currently has a weekly average of 69! According to the way RealRank works, that means his blog is just 69th overall out of all the blogs using RealRank as far as number of visitors, pageviews, and active inbound links. The real question is how does that compare to what something like Google Analytics reports?

If you look at how RealRank’s formula works, it is a competition for every spot and your score can fluctuate wildly every day based on new blogs signing up and lulls in your traffic. PageRank stays constant for a long time unless Google smacks you down for some reason, so there is an inherent stability in PageRank that isn’t there with RealRank. Since the numbers can move so quickly, it seems to me all you’d have to do to game the system is run a bunch of target ads pointing back to your site for a period of 1 week so that your RealRank weekly average numbers would shoot through the roof since you could generate thousands of pageviews and visitors which is what the algorithm is weighted toward. If someone were to look at the historical graph they would notice what you did pretty easily, but if you are just reporting a specific “RealRank” to advertisers it would be correct. In a way, people try to game Google’s algorithm in the same way, but Google is much slower to respond to changes since they don’t do PageRank updates every night (can you imagine the CPU required to do that?!).

The competition for every spot I mentioned also worries me somewhat, as with Google there could be thousands of sites that have a PageRank of 5, and less and less as you go up the PageRank toward 10, where only about 15-25 sites reside. With RealRank if you look at the Top 100 RealRanks, there are only 100 sites representing those Top 100. If enough blogs registered with IZEA, it will be like Alexa’s rating where if you have 2,000,000 it means you are the 2,000,000th ranked site according to their toolbar stats. If you have a bad RealRank that could be more detrimental than having say a PR 3 with a low number of visitors since PageRank is universally accepted by advertisers as a means of seeing how good a site you have for placing ads on. Of course, advertisers should really be looking at your site statistics from something like Analytics to see your actual traffic sources, visitor loyalty and trends and what kind of incoming keywords you have to see if it fits with their target market.

I’m hoping that RealRank will fix some of their issues and also add some factor of stability so that a 20% drop in your weekend traffic for some reason doesn’t tank your RealRank instantly. I think part of their algorithm should probably include historical ranking (maybe 10% -15%) so that a site with a longstanding history of a high rank will not drop as quickly as one that is “flash in the pan”. This will help prevent gaming the system some since you can’t instantly shoot up to the top by running a large ad campaign.