This blog post may be giving a bad feeling to many Bloggers who are actually a fan of the Indiblogger’s Indirank Service but am quite amazed with the service it offers and feel that they need to have a option where we the Blog owners can update their Indirank anytime they wish, allowing the stats to be updated always. The system would rank all the blogs which are listed on the IndiBlogger network all of which are manually verified and approved which is actually good. Next based on a Automated system which calculates the rank based on multiple factors, it displays a rank out of a total of 100 points – the more the higher.
The reason why i feel that the whole IndiRank system is a Big FAIL is because it is a Automated System which mainly relies on the Page Rank & the Number of Posts made in the month. I have been tracking this from a few months and have been reading their forum where members have been publishing their new ranks. Today the April months rank for all the Blogs were updated and the system messaged me saying that actually this blog’s Indirank went down from 82 to 57 WOW
Dear Amit Bhawani,
The new rank for your blog Amit Bhawani Tech Blog is now 57.
Check out your stats now:
via IndiBlogger.in – We’ve combined traditional ranking mechanisms such as a blog’s Google PageRank, Incoming links and alexa ranking. The system also checks to see the frequency at which a blog is updated, and two other secret ingredients. Some of these factors have more weightage than the rest.
As per the above Stats which are provided by IndiBlogger itself, we have a great Alexa rank, the system was able to detect our feed, we have recently updated our blog and have a decent enough Page Rank. Though there is no real reason why the Ranks Drop or Gain every month. If the system says that they were able to find our feed and also acknowledges that we have recently updated our blog, then why was the system showing the Frequency of Posting has gone down. Quite a confusing where on metric is counted and on the other hand its claimed that its not counted 😐
There are many other services which offer similar ranking features along with badges but i feel that IndiBlogger should focus more on transparency and give out the details on what basis these ranks are generated. We have been loosing these ranks from 85 to 82 to 57 and am sure after this post may be reach 0 but this won’t affect any of our Readers, Content, Visitors, Subscribers, Income etc though this kind of post may help the team understand that they need to upgrade their system for better branding and become the best Blogging Network for India.
To prove that these ranks are a fail, there are many other examples which can be shown. Here is one of the latest forum post made by a member who claims that their 43 days old blog has got a Indirank of 75. Now that specific blog which has a Alexa Rank of >100k , has a PageRank of 0 gets a higher rank may be only on the basis of Regularly Updating. While if thats the factor which is mainly counted then am sure Auto Blogging Script based blogs could easily reach the top.
Note to Indiblogger : We have been updating this blog every month with a minimum of around 100 Blog Posts, have a Alexa Rank of ~6000, Regularly linked from Social Media & Social Networking websites, relatively lower Page Rank though even Google does not factor it much in the Search Engine Rankings these days.
Surely its a fail. I know that my blog is not that great but, first it started high than lowered and the lowered again.
I doubt their system even works.
The Indirank may be not a worthy system at this moment, but still posts like these can actually help them upgrade their system and give them more idea on what users need and how they feel about their service. May be in a few years this can be ones of the biggest blog networks in India. 🙂
That is interesting….but how does the rank even matter? 😛
Hey Amit! Firstly, sorry to see your IndiRank crash like that… as we’ve said on our IndiRank page, no one should take our rank too seriously because no automated system can accurately judge a blog on its value. 🙂
About giving blog owners the option to update their rank at any given point of time – IndiRank is a relative calculation, where each factor is given a score in comparison to the values of all the other bloggers in the network at that given point of time. So it has to be done as a batch…
About the frequency of posting, which is why your rank crashed this month: as you’ve rightly mentioned, IndiRank has to take into consideration automated blogging scripts and bots. You update your blog often as you’ve said – but there appears to be a problem with the timings on your feed. According to your feed at the time when it was crawled, the average time between each of your last 10 posts is less than 10 minutes. (594 seconds to be exact!) That’s why our system did not take the frequency into consideration – because it assumes that anyone who blogs that often is a bot! Perhaps you’ve uncovered a bug here, and we should increase the threshold to less than 5 minutes. Or we need to figure out a better way to weed out bots. 😐
Thanks for the heads-up Amit, and for keeping us on our toes, we know that IndiRank has a lot of work to be done – and this feedback certainly helps. Perhaps the first order of the day is to give it more transparency so that the bugs can be pointed out! 🙂
Thanks for replying Renie regarding the whole system. Actually its rare that our blog posts updated very much frequently, while this happens only few times a month but what about the whole months progress? While all the posts were always displayed on the profile page and it was regularly updated, still the system could not find it. No issues atleast a manual updating option would be useful in situations like this.
Also how about smaller badge’s for the Ranks display which can be used by the Bloggers. Am referring the Javascript based badges which can be useful in building the IndiRank Brand.
Obviously, 57 is not a proper rank for this blog. But there is some problem with your feed. (as in screenshot) that’s why your rank dropped.
Use the RSS link “/feed” instead of feedburner…. I faced once.
But the ranking system is not a complete fail… you will find all the top blogs in 87+ category. Yours was an exception becoz of some error.
BTW, Who cares about Rankings …. all that counts is the statistics, (Alexa, Backlinks, no. of readers)
As mentioned in the post there is no error in terms of Feed URL because its correctly displayed there and is regularly updated on the Blogger Profile Page here – http://www.indiblogger.in/blogger/18882/
Hey Amit, the issue is, our crawler can only get accurate dates from an XML feed, and most feeds have only the last 10 posts… so in fact, it’s not taking all the posts from that month into consideration. We tried to update the system continuously throughout the month to get a better average, but not all feeds have a unique ID for each post – which meant that every time we checked the feed and updated our DB, there would be overlaps/duplication… so finally we settled on checking the feed only once.
About the manual option – that would be nifty, and I’m sure bloggers will love it! 🙂 We’ll look into that for sure.
Smaller badges – also a good suggestion. That shouldn’t take us too much time to implement, stay tuned!
@AgentDeepak – your IndiRank has been a consistent 77 for the last 4 months… was your rank lower before then?
“the average time between each of your last 10 posts is less than 10 minutes. (594 seconds to be exact!) That’s why our system did not take the frequency into consideration – because it assumes that anyone who blogs that often is a bot!”.
So if i were to buy 10 articles from a professional writer and then publish them one by one,will i be considered a spammer?This is freaking me out because i have been thinking of buying plenty of articles each day and publishing them.Hope google does not consider the post frequency as a factor.
Kudos for bringing this to notice of everyone. The ranking system sucks and how can we even discuss when indiblogger themselves asks not to take it seriously. They come up with half-baked products and want the community to believe them. It is even more discouraging to see that blogger proudly display these badges.
@Rajdeep – where do you blog?
@Renie – And how does that matter? It seems you can’t accept criticism. The truth is that you guys survive on ‘free’ ideas from the community. A good rank means lower numbers and not higher. Didn’t you go to school?
@Rajdeep – lol! You’ve got me wrong dude, I only asked so I can trace you on IndiBlogger and figure out what kind of a bad experience you’ve had with IndiRank. No need to get personal here man, and believe me, if we can’t take criticism, we wouldn’t have a forum! 🙂 About the rank – it’s not necessarily that way, there are several ranking systems where a higher number is better, take Google Pagerank for instance…And yes, we do survive on ideas from the community, but we like to call it “listening to your audience and responding to them!”. 🙂
@Renie Forget about having bad experience, Indirank itself is flawed. Accept it.
@amit, well I did always take the indirank with a pinch of salt and depended more on google analytics, though it did provide another metric that made me think and pass my free time whenever available. nice find with the bug by the way, and I liked the thorough way that you presented the problem
@renie, I guess there might also be another obvious problem, Is indirank too dependent on the date of the last post and its distance (calenderical ofcourse) from the date the crawler crawls the blog? I fso, indirank can be easily manipulated with the date of the indirank being given every month………
It is so juvenile you know..it s like school kids fighting for lunch boxes….
..folks at indiblogger are trying their best…if it doesn’t suit someone..that ‘s fine too.
If you are confident that your blog is good,then it is.What others say or think or rank is hardly indicative of your readership.
and If it bothers you that much, to have a wrong Indirank – take it off your site.simple. what’s the big deal?
just because it is google page rank – it does not guarantee perfection…you know.
likewise for Indiblogger team – if you have put up a feature, then defining it beyond logical argument is the need of the hour.
So in summary I think both of your are right in your own ways…I really think this doesn’t not warrant so much airtime.
i never cared for rankings of Indilbogger as it did same to me 🙂
sometime it ends up with creepy errors like feeds not detected!
Yeah true said..Its really based on posts..my blog is just 3months old and it gives me 74th rank..lol
But im happy to my alexa rank..its around ~640k and dropping.
Hey Amit
I am a big Fan of your’s and I have been following you for the last 2 years . You have been a really good internet guide and so I have decided to dedicate a blog on you named – amitbhawani.info
Although it is not ready yet and it is a very small blog as I know nothing about you much.
This is my way of showing appreciation
That’s interesting, appreciate it.
@renie… these comments will surely help your system to improve :):) newcomer to your indiblogger 😀 😀 hope to get good reviews :P:P