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.
