Money Crashers Personal Finance Blog Rankings

With the recent LoveDrop promotion, I figured we might as well keep the theme of promoting others (a la Yakezie).

My buddy over at MoneyCrashers, Andrew shot me an email a while back about their new Top PF Blogs tool they recently launched.  There’s plenty of other ranking systems out there already, so what makes this one any different?

We formulated a unique algorithm that factors in statistics like FeedBurner subscribers, Twitter followers, Alexa rank, Compete rank, Technorati authority, Google PageRank, number of inbound links according to Yahoo, SEOmoz rank, and SEMRush organic search value and then calculates a weighted score based on all of the data.  You’ll find that by accounting for all of these factors, the list is very accurate in ranking all of the top blogs.

At the time of the correspondence, I was a lowly #322.  He tried to offset this with the fact that the list contained a lot of heavy-hitting, big-name blogs… but I wasn’t buying it being the competitive person I am.  There’s been a lot of changes going on to the site, so it’s given me something to work towards improving.  At the time of writing, I’ve soared up to #265 so it appears their algorithm is working just fine!

Interested in a little more information, I asked Andrew to expand on the idea behind the ranking methodology.

As for how the rankings work, we don’t want to give away too much as you mentioned, mainly because we don’t want people trying to game the system (which is why we created it to begin with i.e. Alexa).  But basically it’s a weighted average of the various different metrics you see on the list as well as a few others we included in the backend.  They’re weighted differently depending on what we thought were the most relevant and important, and we’re actually still experimenting with the algorithm to try and make it as accurate as possible.  It’s really tough putting numbers on something as subjective as the “best blogs”, but I think we can get pretty close.