Back in April I blogged about the new ranking system implemented by IZEA. It was supposed to show more down to earth *real* blog stats.It's no secret that Google's algorithms are skewed and it's also no secret that Google doesn't like those who participated in paid blogging. In fact, many bloggers who get paid to post on occasion have gotten their Google page rank pulled out from under them, even if they have tons of unique/organic traffic and lots of credible backlinks. Since that happened to me, I was all about IZEA ranks.
Yes, I was, now I'm not so sure it's all that it is cracked up to be. You see, advertisers are supposed to use this tool when creating opportunities for "posties", as we are affectionately called. The reason is simple, I may have a Google page rank of 0 but my RR (real rank) may be in the 1,000's, which is very good considering the number of bloggers in the system. I am getting traffic to my blogs even if Google says I suck!
I have been working very hard at building relationships with other bloggers, being active in blogging communities, creating interesting content for my readers and interacting with them as well. Things have been going decently but it is definitely a slow process, which I knew it would be.
Recently, I tried an experiment. I found a topic of great interest and blogged about it on my Witchy Mama blog. Well, the results were stunning! People were Googling and finding my blog as #2 in the search results which led them to me. My blog stats climbed quickly:
I made the post in the early evening on July 16th. As you can see I got quite a few hits that night. My RR was going down, in the 900's. Then, look at the next day! Over 2,000 visitors! RR was in the 400's by this time! I was so excited! Then, over 7,000 visitors in ONE day? HOLY COW!As you can see in the chart below, my RR was slowly going down. Down is good, the lower the number, the better:
I was looking forward to more opportunities or higher paying opportunities since I had such an excellent RR.Well, I got 2. Yep, 2. One for $7 and one for $8, lovely huh? Funny thing is, I got one for my Financial blog, which has a RR in the 5,000's and I was paid $7 for that one! What is this excellent RR getting me? A whole lotta nuttin', really.
Today I check out my RR and what do I see? This:
Holy Shit! My blog is in the Top 100?! WOW! I looked to see what my other blogs are ranked at:
UnbalancedLibra isn't doing too bad. I bet I'll start to see lots of opportunities pour in....So far today I have had a grand total of ZERO opps! Hahaha...oh yea, it's the weekend, silly me, there is hardly ever anything new on the weekends, lots of good this awesome rank is doing me, huh?Unfortunately, this was an experiment and therefore the bounce rate was high. People did a search, found what they wanted and moved on. Not too many stayed on my page. Although, I went from 17 RSS feed subscribers to 40 to 84 yesterday and now it's at 38 today...WTH?
In any event, my numbers are back to *normal* today on that blog and I am sure I will see my RR climb the charts once again and I'll still be getting just as many opps then as I am now. Ha!
2 comments:
The problem with real ranks is this, how many bloggers outside of payperpost & social spark, use it?
How many bloggers outside of the paid blogging system really use it?
That's thee thing to look at.
With google page rank, it ranks every blog, every website on the internet, real rank only ranks blogs and sites that sign up to use it, and install the code.
But any blog that installs the code, gets smacked by google because google crawls sites, it knows what things to look for to determine paid linking, and the itk tools are well known in the blog world to be owned and run by izea.
google knows this and starts punishing sites with it installed.
Bloggers who want to stay page ranked, blogs who don't even do paid linking, have tried itk tools to see their real ranks, to see how they compare, and they got deranked by google.
They removed itk tools and on the next google update, they got it back, or most of it back.
But as you even said in this post, having a really good real rank doesn't mean you're making more money at all, you're still barely getting any opps, and the pay is still extremely low.
Plus, payperpost is still using page rank even though izea promised all it's bloggers they would remove it, almost a year ago when they first started announcing social spark.
When are they going to remove it? When are they going to raise the min base pay from $5 to something far more deserving of those 300 word, 3 link opps, something like $10 min.
It's been promise after broken promise.
Yep, I agree and many of the things you mentioned are some of the same reasons I made this post. It's great within the PPP circle, so to speak - because recently I have gotten MORE opportunities keeping my RR under 2,000 but those 300 word $5 opps are still rampant and I have taken some on occasion - unfortunately, in this economy - I NEED that money. I average about $500 or so a month with paid blogging.
The whole ITK thing makes me wonder....I mean, I often thought THAT was the coding Google bots were picking up - therefore knowing if a blog does paid posting or not - I wonder if I remove just that coding next PR update, if I'll get any PR back or if I am just blacklisted forever...
Thanks for stopping by, wish I knew who you were - I'd love to chat more.
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