stub
HomeMoneyRevisiting the Personal Finance Blog Rankings

Revisiting the Personal Finance Blog Rankings

6 months ago, I ranked the different personal finance rankings. I reviewed WiseBread’s Top Personal Finance Blogs, Money Crashers Top Personal Finance Blogs, the Technorati Finance Rankings, and the Yakezie Personal Finance Blog Network.

We had several different takeaways:

  • Page Rank is not updated often enough, but that it’s an extremely useful tool for advertisers.
  • MozRank is updated more frequently than Page Rank and is gaining more trust by some advertisers.
  • Compete statistics don’t accurately portray traffic stats by itself, but it may be a decent comparison tool because it gets the relative amount of traffic right most of the time (when comparing two sites, for example, it typically knows which gets more traffic even if the prediction it makes is off).
  • Klout is an excellent metric that measures social influence.

We also got some great feedback from Gyutae from Money Crashers, Will from WiseBread, and Financial Samurai of the Yakezie, all of whom helped gain some valuable insight into their process!

So let’s revisit and see what changes have been made!

WiseBread came out with new rankings on June 1st that update weekly, and I think they do a great job of deciding which blogs are at the top of their list. There has been a lot of movement, but the biggest development is that they removed Page Rank! That’s a huge change because it has now become a list that appeals more to users instead of one that relies too heavily on a possibly outdated metric.

I understand that we shouldn’t be using a metric that doesn’t reflect reality, but advertisers often base their campaigns off of Page Rank exclusively, so doesn’t it have some place in there?

My solution to the Page Rank issue is to include it on the list but not have it factor into rankings. I think WiseBread put a real focus on users which is fantastic, but adding Page Rank back to the metrics while giving it no weight would be ideal so advertisers would still use it as their go-to tool.

The Money Crashers list is much more comprehensive in that it includes corporate blogs, which isn’t included on any of the other lists. We have to decide whether that makes the list more or less relevant, but my opinion is that the personal finance rankings should be non-corporate blogs. Another issue with the rankings is that they doesn’t include Klout in their rankings, which makes me sad.

One plus for the Money Crashers rankings (that WiseBread doesn’t have) is that they include an RSS link next to each blog so you can click over and sign up for updates quickly.

The Technorati rankings have not changed much. It’s still a nice list, but with few features. I have slipped in these rankings, which is a good thing, but looking at the ranking of some blogs makes me want to cry foul.

The Yakezie rankings, which update daily (some information updates weekly), also include a link to the RSS feed for easy access. It also shows a true level of involvement in the community using the Belts of Honor system, whereby half a user’s scored is determine based on the number of comments a user has since inception.

The drawback to the Yakezie is that it’s exclusive. The list only contains 76 names, which is low compared to the thousands of Technorati blogs, the nearly 800 blogs listed in the WiseBread rankings, and the approximately 450 in the Money Crashers list.

Now that you know the positives and negatives, the recent changes along with the recurring issues, which ranking system is your favorite? Which is the most useful for consumers and which is the best for advertisers?

RELATED ARTICLES

12 COMMENTS

  1. Don’t forget traffic, bounce rates, thought provoking content, and the social aspect of blogs. The more social the better your rank!

  2. Ive got a good idea for the other ranking system other than Yakezie.

    They should include what a blog’s Yakezie rank and whether a blog is part of the Yakezie Network at all, given we have the most collaborative and social group of blogs on the web!

    The Yakezie system requires a 6 month Challenge to get on, ensuring a very dynamic, active community and group of bloggers.

    Best,

    Sam

  3. re: Wisebread. I think PR should be included in the formula – but dumbed down a lot given the lack of updates. It is not an irrelevant metric but it has less importance to bloggers. Also, Wisebread really needs to re-work this new support model. While they took MONTHS to re-do their ranking it takes weeks (I think close to a month) to get a response to get re-added to the list.

    As a Yakezie members I am a bit biased to these rankings but I can see how heavily being involved it weighed. That is great for internal metrics for members but it would certainly confuse people outside the network.

    MoneyCrashers is a well rounded system of ranking as far as I can tell. The corporate blog inclusion is annoying as these massive entities can throw tons of resources at their “blogs”.

    As for Klout, i’m torn. There are sites out there that are popular, successful and very well visited/read that have poor Klout scores. Twitter, FB et al. is not the be all end all. These sites work for some but not for others.

    Just my $0.02

    • @Sustainable PF, I agree. The metrics can really get confusing. I like using the Yakezie so I can compare to others in my niche.

  4. These are all battles we struggled with when coming up with our metrics for our own list (see the link above). In the end we decided on the following variables for our list: Twitter followers, Klout score, feed subscribers, Technorati authority, SEOmoz rank, Google rank, Alexa links, SEOmoz links, Alexa rank and Compete rank.

    We update the data every 2-3 days and we initially had some weird Technorati authority scores and difficulties with the feed subscriber lists, but we’ve managed to iron those out, so it’s ticking along now. Daniel I’d love to hear what you think about our’s too!!

    I think Yakezie’s exclusivity is very powerful. It’s an aspiration to get into their members list and rise up the ranks.

  5. I love these lists in that (I assume) that’s where some of my advertiser inquiries come from. I hate to ask them how they found me, but I suspect they run down some of these lists and contact everyone (our they probably outsource that actually)…

    • @Darwin’s Money, Maybe they’re using PageRank, don’t you think? Doesn’t a go-to retirement list need to have that included?

  6. Generally how much time it takes after you submit your blogs to these lists, to see your blog appear on list?

    I submitted my blog on wisebread two weeks back, till date, I don’t see it on the list. Although blogs with less popularity than mine are on.

  7. I usually prefer to get stats from compete.com, what matter for me while advertising on other blogs is traffic of the blog. If a blog has good traffic and good pageviews i prefer to advertise on that blog.
    Google Page rank is not a factor which can influence your advertisement options.

    Thanks

  8. One thing to keep in mind about the Technorati rankings is that they are based on recent incoming links. So getting a bunch of reciprocal links from hosting a large carnival could give a smaller site a temporary pump in the rankings.

  9. The comments from Darwin’s Money, are probably right. People use these lists, looking at various metrics and then just work their way down the list. It’s a good way to rank sites but sometimes some good sites fall through the cracks.

Comments are closed.

Most Popular

Recent Comments