EatonWeb to Phase Out PageRank in its Metrics Computation
November 16, 2007 | By J. Angelo Racoma | Filed Under Blog Directories, Features, Google, SEO, Search
Google’s latest PageRank update caused a ruckus in the blogosphere because many high profile or popular blogs have had significant drops in ranking. While experts will tell you that PageRank is not the end-all and be-all of blogging, it still is a big factor, especially when it comes to marketing and advertising. This means advertisers still look for sites with good PR juice, and ad placement rates are still PR-dependent in many cases.
However, there are other metrics by which you can determine how good a blog is performing. Earlier this year, Splashpress Media relaunched the EatonWeb Blog directory and introduced the momentum metric.
Now, EatonWeb is radically changing the way it values blogs’ performance by devaluing the role of Google PageRank from its own algorithm, mostly because of how Google manually penalized sites in the recent PR update.
Google has been systematically introducing the equivalent of theoretical epicycles to its display of PageRank to the public, and we think it’s about time to face the facts. You can’t manually penalize hundreds of influential sites and expect to be used as a reliable source of information any longer.
In fact, we believe that PageRank epicycles are chinks in the Google armor and that Google needs to make a major strategical decision going forward to preserve its influence in the webmaster community. And in the end, it’s going to come down to whether Google can accurately determine the value of each independent link, buffering the outflow of poor quality links, rather than inaccurately painting an artificially depressed picture of site authority.
Google PageRank is no longer considered a reliable indicator of importance in the blogosphere. In this light, EatonWeb is not necessarily taking PR completely out of its measurement, but only devaluing the weight of PR in the EatonWeb metrics.
The EatonWeb directory measures blog peformance using over a dozen individual metrics from a variety of sources. The EatonWeb momentum metric gives a measure of relative growth over time at any given point. The overall metric, meanwhile, is the result of combining the strength and momentum metrics, and shows a blog’s overall quality. This is considered the best means of valuing a blog taking into consideration both age and growth in one measurement.
About the author: J. Angelo Racoma is the assistant editor of the Blog Herald. A professional blogger, blog network manager and new media consultant, he serves as editor-in-chief at Splashpress Media, managing the various creative and administrative aspects of the company's blogs and blog-related services. Angelo discusses technology, productivity, writing and getting things done on his personal blog, the J Spot.
Comments
4 Responses to “EatonWeb to Phase Out PageRank in its Metrics Computation”
Leave a Reply
Sponsors
News
What Are Your Favorite Quotes?July 19, 2008 | By Lorelle VanFossen | 1 Comment
The writer is… an athlete required to break the four-minute mile every morning.
— Irving Stone
Replace writer with blogger and you have a good description of what the job of blogging is.
I’ve been collecting quotes since I was very young. One of my favorite books is the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, which just celebrated it’s [...]
Ghost Bloggers Growing in Popularity?
July 18, 2008 | By Andrew G.R. | 3 Comments
Toronto’s Globe and Mail is asking the question that’s on everybody’s mind (sarcasm): Does rapper Kanye West have a “ghost blogger?”
While the concept of ghost writing is hardly new (celebs have been relying on professional writers to create content that is officially credited to them forever), it looks like ghost blogging is blipping onto [...]
PodPress Update in 10 Days
July 18, 2008 | By Thord Daniel Hedengren | 1 Comment
PodPress is probably the most used podcasting plugin for WordPress, and the one we’ve been using here at The Blog Herald. However, there have been issues with it since WordPress 2.5, and it doesn’t work with recently released 2.6. Among others that are frustrated are David Peralty, who’s written about the issue.
Luckily, the PodPress developer [...]
Twitter Outage Used to do Upgrades, New Design Being Tested
July 18, 2008 | By Thord Daniel Hedengren | Leave a Comment
Twitter experienced an unplanned outage, and is down and out for maintenance. They are using this outage to upgrade the affected database, according to a blog post. The service is still down, but hopefully we’ll be getting our microblogging cravings satisfied soon.
Speaking of Twitter, they have apparently tested a new design on select users. SheGeeks [...]
Unannounced Blogging Hiatus
July 17, 2008 | By Andrew G.R. | Leave a Comment
I’m back after a three-week bout of NoBloggingitis (be careful, it might be contagious). I never intended not to blog. Simply put, life just got in the way. The big event in my life was selling my place and moving into a new one. While I expected it to be stressful, [...]
Female Bloggers Want Out of Playboy Poll
July 17, 2008 | By Thord Daniel Hedengren | 3 Comments
Veronica Belmont and Sarah Austin wants out of the sexiest female bloggers poll on Playboy, according to a story on TechCrunch, but Playboy says no. It would, of course disrupt the poll. While I have no love for these kind of polls, and the Playboy one is no exception, I do think that if you’ve [...]
Patrons
Sponsored Links
Recent listings from Blogger Jobs
Content Quake Looking for BloggersWe got this through email from Content Quake: Content Quake has several established blogs that are in need of new writers! From NFL blogs to Celebri [...]
Business Bloggers Wanted
We got this from Business Man World: We are looking for bloggers to write about business on a bloggers community. It is not necessary to have previ [...]
A Trio of Blogging Opportunities
This batch is courtesy of our sister site, Performancing.com: Retro Gaming bloggers needed! — “We need bloggers who are passionate abou [...]
Today.com is Hiring Bloggers Daily
Today.com is hiring bloggers daily!! Join the fastest growing blog network in the world If you like to write and would like to make money part time, [...]
Blogging Jobs at MechaWorks
We got this through email from MechaWorks: MechaWorks is a new blogging start-up and we’re offering several new blogging positions. So, if you [...]
More at Blogger Jobs
Contributors
- Andrew G. Rosen
- Andy Merrett
- Anne Helmond
- Arvind Satyanarayan
- Chris Garrett
- Darnell Clayton
- David Krug
- David Peralty
- J. Angelo Racoma
- Jason Kaneshiro
- Jonathan Bailey
- Lorelle VanFossen
- Matt Craven
- Thord Hedengren
- Valeria Maltoni
Our Blog Metrics
Recommended
Google PageRank is no longer considered a reliable indicator of importance in the blogosphere.
Then why is every blogger whining about it?
I personally never understood the page rank system, except that advertisers (and other bloggers) wanted to advertise or exchange links more aggressively because of it.
Ironically, my best blog had a lower page rank than all my other sites, yet outperformed all of them put together as far as traffic and revenue was concerned.
It was only until recently that Google increased my PageRank (after dropping it down twice) that it is now fairly high.
Like I said, I never really understood the Google PR, although hopefully people will measure the success of a blog by its traffic/comments/revenue/influence, rather than from a corporations green thermometer.
people will measure the success of a blog by its traffic/comments/revenue/influence, rather than from a corporations green thermometer.
[...] hasn’t been much change, if any, in their traffic levels. In light of this, EatonWeb is recalibrating is algorithm so that it now takes PageRank out of the equation (indeed, it devalues [...]
[...] EatonWeb to Phase Out PageRank in its Metrics Computation : The Blog Herald [...]