Why Ranking Matters

We live in a world full of statistics. We’re always measuring ourselves against our competitors and most of the time success is tied with performance and relative positions.

Unfortunately the web is a place where everything is measurable. Every click, visit, pageview, source can be added, combined and reported.

But even though we might know very well what users are doing on our site, comparing ourselves with others is where things get tricky.

One of those semi-reliable comparison metrics was Google’s PageRank. But today Barry Schwartz wrote that Google had dropped the PageRank metric from their Webmaster tools product, signaling that Google might want to kill the indicator from our radars:

Susan Moskwa from the Google Webmaster Central team explained it was removed because Google keeps telling webmasters “that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much.” They felt it was “silly” to keep telling webmasters that, and at the same time show it in Webmaster Tools. So Google removed it from Webmaster Tools.

PageRank had been an obsession in the early days of the web, and it showed how much authority you had over your competitors. However some sneaky webmasters started to game it and it became one of those tug of war battles that Google apparently didn’t want to get into.

Webmasters have been asking Google to remove the PageRank from the Google Toolbar, as it’s always buggy, or severely behind in updates. To this day, the Toolbar still has the PageRank indicator but it hasn’t been working for days (at least for me).

This comes in the heels of Technorati’s relaunch, where a special emphasis has been given to their new authority algorithm. Louis Gray writes:

They ditched the old metrics for attributing authority, as it was considered too static, and now will aim to reward authors for posting frequency, context and linking behavior. Interestingly, they have also introduced authority by topics, meaning that technology blogs can be compared to others in their sector, as can sports blogs, music blogs, and so on.

The problem is that Technorati’s influence has gone down thanks to a less than stellar record in the past couple of years. They’ve been plagued by outages and statistics have come and gone at irregular intervals. Rob Diana asked to his readers yesterday “Is It Too Little Too Late For Technorati?”

So at this point we’re left with one quality player in the market — at least for bloggers.

PostRank (notice how those initials fit nicely with Google’s PageRank) has been a very good service so far. The definition is summed nicely on this AdAge post:

PostRank is a service that measures the active engagement of your blog posts. By tracking sources such as Digg, Twitter, Facebook, del.icio.us and Google, activity such as RSS feed subscriptions, comments your posts receive, and good, ol’ fashioned, page views, PostRank can measure how well your blog does on a post-by-post basis.

PostRank made a smart move in August, by offering all their data via a real-time API that is being leveraged by various partners. They also offer a very nice top posts widget that I just recently installed on my blog, and highly recommend for yours.

PostRank only applies, though, for blogs. What about for the rest of the sites? There are great services like Compete and my favorite, Quantcast, that can deliver good information, although, in my experience, their data collection mechanisms are not be trusted. Quantcast can be more precise for those sites that have enabled their tag (which you can identify with the label “quantified”).

At the end of the day we should always know that statistics are never right, and that rankings should be used with a grain of salt. The quality of your audience is more important than where you stand in relation to your competitors.

And there’s no tool yet to measure that.

Photo by Suelen Pessoa