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OK when Real Rank was first announced it coincided with the giant vicious Google PR smack down.  At that time I reviewed it and was pretty hard on it.  I have since discussed it directly with several People at PayPerPost and Izea and in fact I am even doing a bit of "fully disclosed evil" just to help them get better with fraud detection.  I have in fact told them to just let me know and I will manipulate any holes they want me to point out and show them how I am doing it just to get the fraud detection up to high standards.  Black hat is not just for evil folks, only a black hat can tell you how to protect yourself from said techniques.

So the other thing I realized in this was I was viewing Real Rank as a direct replacement to Google's PR and that is just not a fair way to judge it.  Google PR is measured by one and only one thing, the links to a site and the "link value" of the sites that provide the links to the target site.  It is really quite complex because it mines many levels deep into the back links and does things like discount the value of a link that is two way or reciprocal in nature.  In essence it give you an idea of how much "link juice" a site has. 

Now some have said PR does not matter but that is short sighted.  So long as you take out sites that have been hand jobed down by Google the PR is a good indicator of how much "power" a sites links have.  To make this simple, put an anchor link on a site with a PR2 for a term and point it to site A then put the same anchor on a PR 4 site and link it to site B.  If everything else about sites in question are equal then Site B will and does rank higher for the anchored term.  There are complexities that would require an in depth SEO lesson to explain but from a mile high view this is an accurate view of Page Rank from Google.

If we look to Real Rank to provide a replacement to that type of "valuation" of a site it isn't even close.  However, Real Rank is not designed to be that type of replacement.  Rather then a replacement it is more accurately an alternative to PR and it is also intended to be an alternative to things like Alexa which are clearly flawed.  If the visitors to your site are to smart to install Alexa Tool Bars (basicly an honest form of Spyware) into their browsers your Alexa will never be accurate.  Alexa works ok for very top end sites in the top say 10,000 for the other several billion sites a site with a 100,000 rank and one with a 1,000,000 rank may be about the same in traffic levels.  You would expect more from a gap of 900,000 from  decent system would you not.

So now judging Real Rank as a stand alone system let me go over a few of my views on the positive side.

1.  Izea is smart enough to say that they know there is no perfect ranking system right off the bat.  That humility will probably go a long way toward making the end product pretty damn solid. 

2.  Real Rank requires code to be placed on the site.  The value here is this will reflect what actually happens on the site vs something like Alexa which only monitors a fairly small segment of real internet visitors. 

3.  Izea is taking fraud seriously from the beginning.  I am now directly consulting with them and actively manipulating some sites in an effort to help them learn to track this stuff.  I only pointed out holes in the first place so they would be filled, I learned that the Izea team was already working on it.  They have also be very open to my help.  I imagine others like me are helping too and I think fraud will be fairly scarce and hard to pull off on the final product.  

4.  The Real Rank system is weighted mostly in traffic.  There is no question a site with active visitors is more valuable then one with far few visitors in most instances. 

5.  Real Rank will reward site owners who work hard to get a lot of traffic to their sites.  Such sites will have to rely to some degree on good seo tactics so a site with a good Real Rank will probably have a decent amount link value as well. 

I am still not in love with Real Rank and here are some other suggestions/observations I have 

1.  As code must be on the site there is a potential for Google or other systems to target sites using it.  Izea plans to make it available to all sites at some point and that will help a lot.  It was one of my original suggestions and I say do it ASAP.  Hopefully Real Rank will in time give users some more site data similar to analytics data that would increase the value of the product to the end users and speed adoption.  Izea is probably smart and will most likely pay its 100K posties to advertise the new system when it is open to outsiders.

2.  The other problem I see is a two edged sword that will impact this system in two ways.  One early and the other later on.  Real Rank grades on a "curve".   When I was in school I had teachers that did this.  In school it works this way, if the highest grade on a test was an 88% then that becomes the high side of the curve.  In other words the guy with an 88 gets a 100% and everyone is judged from his level down.  I would usually get a 96-100 and "ruin the curve" for everyone.

Real Rank has a level of this "on the curve" factor.  Right now only bloggers and most of them small time are in the system. So a guy like me can easily push his blog to the top 10%.  On the other hand if you actually make Real Rank a success and a lot of big sites add it they "up the bell curve" and now the small guys are pushed to the bottom by default.  It is worse then the "school curve" because in school on a test everyone can get an A if they try hard enough.  The problem with the bell curve in raking websites is 50% must be in the bottom 50%. 

How big is this problem?  Well it gets bigger when the biggest sites get involved or when participation is very low.  Is it a deal breaker?  No but it is something to be aware of.  The reality is every site with the Google system could be a PR4 or higher in theory at least.  I would think it would be in Izea's best interest to strive for a system at some point where sites are ranked more on an expectation rather then simply compared to their peers.  Of course such changes could come in time with mathematical adjustments etc.

3.  Right now real rank is planned to update every day.  This may seem like an advantage but to me that must mean daily sampling.  Now as long as we are on the "bell curve" described above this can and will probably lead to widely fluctuating ranks.  I may be way off on this though!  Right now the site owner and advertisers see very different figures, when you start seeing your site ranked a "4" or an "8" these fluctuations may not really be that bad. 

The key though in serving the advertisers is if my blog is on most days a 8 but drops during a 24 hour period to a 6 then both I and the advertiser loose opportunity.  Something like weekly averages may provide more accuracy.  Certainly daily is better then the 90-180 days that Google uses for PR but daily may be to much.  If I judged sales people on daily numbers I would have fired a lot of real superstars over the years.

Overall Real Rank has real potential and I think we should understand it will continue to evolve 

So indeed I think my first assessment of Real Rank was way to harsh.  I also believe that the recent Google rank spank is a real problem for PayPerPost and Real Rank won't just fix that problem over night.  However, I don't think Real Rank was ever supposed to do that in the first place.  Had Google not slammed these bloggers for say another 3 months and Real Rank had been given that time to mature things might look a lot different.

One thing is for sure I have found that the staff at all levels at Izea and PayPerPost are very open to working with their posties and their customers.  They take feed back and really consider what you tell them.  That is the mark of a great company,

Jack Spirko 

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