RealRank Sucks

January 10, 2008 by
Filed under: Reviews 

IZEA, the company that runs PayPerPost and pays bloggers to write about products, has just launched their new “blogging statistics” site called RealRank. IZEA said that there was no accurate way to measure a blogs popularity, but that is a blatant marketing lie. Google has “sent the hounds” on IZEA and their products because Google does not want people artificially gaming their system, so Google has resorted to banning and penalizing offending blogs. Google has been lowering/removing pagerank from blogs that have been caught selling paid links and paid blog posts that pass Pagerank.

From a business standpoint, what would you do if you were IZEA? Google has just messed up the way you sell your product, and thus will hurt your advertisers marketplace. In retaliation, you have to reinvent the wheel with your brand name on it to avoid Google’s power.

RealRank (or IZEARank) sucks because the only reason it exists is so that IZEA can keep selling it’s crappy product. Another reason RealRank sucks is because you have to opt-in to it. There is going to be millions of blogs that never sign up, thus the ranking will not be accurate. I will not sign up because I do not feel like giving IZEA access to all of my visitors. The last time I checked, people call that stuff spyware.

I originally heard about this back in November when IZEA asked Techcrunch and it’s readers if they could allow advertisements for it on the blog. Techcrunch had it’s readers vote and ultimately 55% of them (including me) gave them the boot.

From a forum post:

Why should we vote yes simply so PPP can advertise and get more business while we still get (a lack of) crappy $5 opps? I might have considered voting (I didn’t vote yes or no) if they were actually doing anything to help us out after google killed us basically just for using their service. RealRank is meaningless thus far. Get rid of PageRank as an opp qualification and I might jump on board.

Seems like he took the words right out of my mouth. Now that hundreds (thousands?) of blogs have been penalized for using IZEA’s PayPerPost, they want you to continue supporting them even more. Sure, lets make Google even more pissed off at us by showing them that we don’t need pagerank or google results. All this is leading to is getting sites banned from Google rather than a removal of pagerank.

From RealRank’s announcement:

RealRank is the first site ranking service that focuses exclusively on measuring the traffic and influence of individual blogs throughout the blogosphere.

I stopped after the fourth word. RealRank is far from the first ranking method for blogs. Technorati is amazing and was here far before you. Technorati also ranks over 112.8 million blogs already, and has established themselves as an authority… not to mention they don’t use their status to promote anti-Google projects.

RealRank sucks… IZEARank sucks… whatever you want to call it doesn’t change the fact that it sucks. IZEA is using it to promote their Anti-Google products and continue to keep their pockets full, yet I doubt the majority of bloggers realize that.

Way off topic: New blog theme is nearing completion!

Comments

3 Comments on RealRank Sucks

  1. Sudarshan on Thu, 10th Jan 2008 3:16 pm

    2. Looks like it is going to piss off google more…but its not going to succeed the GOD FATHER

  2. Smith on Thu, 10th Jan 2008 8:33 pm

    3. i cant see this becoming too widespread or popular

  3. Jimbot on Tue, 15th Jan 2008 1:56 am

    4. Selling links will exist forever.

    Selling links via some (put a giant target on my head) 3rd party will exist …the opposite of forever.

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