IZEARanks vs. PageRank

I’m sure, if you’ve used PayPerPost, TextLinkAds or any other sort of paid advertisements on your blog in the last year or so, you were one of the lucky many of us to get spanked by the Google PR Smackdown.

For those of you who may not know what happened, in recent months ( or, more appropriately, years ) Google search has become increasingly aware of bloggers, businesses, etc. who use paid ads and, in order ( so they say ) to keep searches relevant they’ve used a new algorithm that dropped the PR of paid advertisers/link swappers to 0 almost across the board.

Now, not everyone got the ax, of course. Google spared those sites using Google Adsense and Google Adwords, regardless of how worthless a lot of them are compared to who got Zero’d. But other than that, I can sort of see their point – I mean, you don’t want to go to a site that’s set up solely for gain, right? But many of us who blog-from-home to make ends meet are working doubly hard to make sure our blogs still have decent, from-the-heart content and any ads posted are posted in our real voices, with our real opinions and we shouldn’t have been punished for that.

However, Google’s PageRank was actually very flawed. The PR took forever to update, it was based generously on cross-linking from sites with high PR and a lot of estimation. Fortunately, for a lot of us who had to deal with Google’s PR Smackdown there is now an alternative thanks to IZEA, the company that brings you great services like PayPerPost.

In the wake of the Smackdown, IZEA launched what, at the time was called RealRank. It was based on actual traffic, links, and other site statistics and was a far better judge of which sites were the web’s most influential. Well, now you don’t have to be a member of PayPerPost to use RealRank, because it’s now graduated to IZEARanks.com where you can sign up, add a tiny snippet of code to your site and find out where you really stand!

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