IndiRank Upgrade - suggestions please!
Now that we're done making a few small upgrades to IndiVine and the Forum, it's time to look at IndiRank. Addy, you just may be able to crack all the jokes you want this month! 
We're looking for suggestions/feedback/critique here - anything goes. A few questions to get the ball rolling:
- Should we make our algorithm public or would that promote gaming?
- Are there any other influential factors we can include, aside from PageRank, Alexa, Frequency, etc.?
- What information would you like to see as part of your IndiStats?
- Should we increase the frequency of updates, or would that diminish the value of IndiRank updates?
- The stats are available only to those who are logged in. Would you like an export option / widget so that you can share it with your readers?
Reason: Typo!
I believe Indirank should be transperant, the obvious consideration should be quality of the blog or topic or dicussion. I would like to have a versatile personality to be recognised by high ranking. Kudos guys for raking up the issue.
Hi renie,
well i may not be very active on the forum, but i really got a shocker in the form of my IndiRank slipping down a whopping 30 points, last week. not that i was in the top 5 or anything, but the rank going from somewherei n the 60s all the way to 31 was just plain wierd. I jsut thought of checking out some photoblogs in the Photoblog directory. And i was dissappointed and kinda felt cheated by the algorithm. Ill tell you why. While some photoblogs were exceptional and deserved the ranking that they got, i came across tonnes of others, which were just normal blogs with a 'photography' tag, n i couldnt for the life of me figure out, what they were doing in the PhotoBlog section. I mean i really dont get the logic behind having a blog which has just a couple of photo entries n many other text entries n putting them in the same slot as strict photoblogs.
i would again like to say that i do not really give too much attention to the ranks, but i realised that i could just add 1 blog per page to my Photoblog network as all others were just plain blogs.
Though my site benefits from this loophole, I agree with you. I noticed this half a year ago and started adding all reasonable tags that showed up on the left hand-side of the indirank page. Since my site's ranking lives in the 85--90 range, it shows up near or on the top of many categories, driving traffic.
This is clearly not the intended behaviour and should be corrected. Although, I don't see how this is possible unless the indiblogger crew go through every individual site and classify them manually, which doesn't seem feasible.
But after thinking about it for a little bit, I am not so sure.
The indirank photo page really only says: Blogs found with the tag 'photography'. And while my site is not (anymore) a photo blog, its photography section still competes favourably with many of the other purely photography-based sites on the list.
So, does it really make sense to exclude it from the list? I am not so sure anymore.
So is the algorithm already changed as per these requests?
I think Indirank is useless. dont think your blog is bad if you get a low indrank and dont think it is good if it has a high Indirank. It is useful for only newbies who add their blog to the indiblogger and list, and find out that they can beat most of the other user's rank in the first month..:(
I guess Indirank of the month depends upon the stats of your previous month.
Also the way the update freq is calculated is wrong. If I update my blog only once per month(may be on oct 27th) then I will have high update freq as per indiblogger. Instead of "last post date" you should consider the "number of posts per month" as the parameter to find Indirank.
Other things to be considered for indirank are:
1)number of followers or readers.
2)total numer of posts.
3)Total monthly views(may be you can create a custom visitor counter and ask the blogger to place it in his/her blog).But the counter should be intelligent enough to chuck out multiple visits from the same IP or from the author IP.
4)Number of backlinks to the site(in Google).
And one more thing. Why dont you give the rank like Alexa. Too many people getting the same rank is weird and confusing. It would be nice to put the best website as rank as "1" and others in the ascending order like Alexa do.
Let me get my rank/score first! :) then i shall give my suggestions 
but i support the category wise rank too!
I definitely think that the current ranking system, is mysterious and we should keep it the way it is!
1. Don't see any value in making the algorithm public. If at all the voting should be made public where anyone can vote based in IP Address, one vote.
2. You could look at Technorati authority, Feedburner subscriber count etc.
3,4,5 - no change
''Blogs should categorized in a category and should compete against the blog from that category only. Ranking should be relative to other blogs in the category. Kinda like percentile marks.''
Yes Abhi's suggestion is ideally good. But then how about those who post about a whole lot of topics in one blog. Social, photography, travel etc. Should we make each blog for each of these categories
They can categorize their blog under General category!
I completely agree with Pawan here.
My alexa rank dropped significantly and my frequency of blogging increased with the same GPr throughout... but my indirank dropped as it said that my last update was 2 weeks ago which is completely untrue!!! I am clueless
I absolutely agree with both Pawan and Arti. This IndiRank is completely blowing me nuts. I started off with an IndiRank of 74 last month, but this month while my Alexa rank has dropped a lot with more backlinks, it has dropped to 62.
Rennie can you explain whats going on please?
Thanks,
Prasenjit.
"Blogs should categorized in a category and should compete against the blog from that category only. Ranking should be relative to other blogs in the category. Kinda like percentile marks"....a wonderful suggestion from Abhi the truckdriver that I endorse.
I agree with this, because each blog caters to its own share of audience and categorizing everything from photoblog to a poetic one under one ranking is kinda taking the importance away from a few blogs!
You should stop counting Pagerank because it's been more than 6 months since it got updated!
Ooh oooh! Ok I've always been waiting for this so here goes:
A Wordpress.com Indirank Widget!
I have this static image stuck there and it doesn't reflect the fact that I've been ignoring my blog off late. No seriously, would love to have an image that is generated on the fly (since I can't add JavaScript widgets in wordpress.com)
Thanks for listening!
hey Abhi has a point there...honestly !!!
I started a topic 10 mins ago...and it says in the forum "10 hours ago" !!!! am i hallucinating ?? @renie...plz help !!!
Will look into this! (Our server is on US time, and sometimes that has issues!) 
Indi- rank achhi hai . usame koi dikkat hai aisa nahi lagataa. mgar Indivine me kitane lekh [blog] bharatiy bhashame hai ? kripaya yah kaise malum padega / koi batayega iske bareme? kripaya maragdarshan kare .
hey Renie , m jus a newbie in tis world of blogging , bt cn i suggest sumthn ? I mean to say tat , as u hv pointed out in te 2nd option , tat te IndiRank IS influenced by PageRank , Alexa...but dnt u think IndiRank shud b based on te blog itslf , n te blogger's activity on it , n te IndiBlogger website ? I mean why shud IndiRank , which is purely a feature of IndiBlogger, b influenced by te blog's popularity on other websites ? I dnt knw te algo of GPR or Alexa , so wat I am sayn mite sound horrible to u , but , tats wat i felt....
@ Renie.....plz help me wid tis...my stats page says last update 1 month ago , n my IndiRank fell like hell to 56 !!! please help.....
Don't make the algorithm Public ; Increase the frequency of updating IndiRank(Once a week instead of a month) and the ranking shouldn't affected so much with Google PR,because Google PR is just one of the 200 factors that is used to calculate blog/site value.
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