If there is one thing everyone agrees on in the web publishing world, it is that the Alexa ranking is useless. One of the biggest problems with the Alexa toolbar is the distribution of the toolbar itself. There is simply not enough users of the Alexa toolbar, and subsequently not enough data to accurately rank websites.

I was staring at my laptop screen today, at the Google Toolbar actually (which sits above the Alexa toolbar in my browser) when a thought occured to me. Google’s toolbar undoubtedly has a much higher distribution than Alexa’s toolbar–meaning, any data that the Google toolbar can collect will always be better than that of the Alexa toolbar. In June 2006, Adobe and Google announced a partnership in which Adobe would offer its customers the Google Toolbar. Google also features the Google toolbar on its homepage, ranked #3 according to Alexa.

So, what was my thought? Well, what would happen if Google added WebRank to its toolbar? I just came up with the term WebRank as it falls in line with Google’s naming scheme. Rather than PageRank which ranks the link popularity of a particular webpage, WebRank would rank the website you are currently on in comparison to all the other websites out there. Google would be able to more accurately rank all the websites in the world and the effect of the webmaster skew would be reduced due to its larger user base. As a tool for webmasters, it would be extremely useful to see how a site is growing (or not growing). I’ll admit, the only reason I installed the Alexa toolbar was to help my sites get a better Alexa ranking since some companies determine how much an ad is worth on a website based on how it is ranked on Alexa.

Google WebRank

The Alexa rank is calculated based on the number of Alexa users visiting a website, as well as the number of unique page views (refreshing a single page wont increase Alexa page views). While Google could base WebRank on something similar, we all know Google and how they love their algorithms. I have 100% confidence that if Google were to release a metric called WebRank they would make it so complicated a math professor could write an 80 page research paper on it :)

Replacing PageRank on Toolbar?

This might sound crazy, but why not take it one step further and replace PageRank on the toolbar? The PageRank you see on your Google toolbar is not accurate anyway. Google periodically pushes out their internal pagerank information (converted to an integer between 0 and 10) to be displayed on the Google Toolbar. This is usually done every 3-4 months. Inside Google, the PageRank is stored with a much higher degree of accuracy (ie. not an integer) and changes more often whenever there are algorithm changes.

Displaying WebRank would be more useful to users of the toolbar as they can gauge how credible or authoritative a website is based on its rank amongst other websites. Of course, Google would have to ensure the WebRank data is updated more often than the PageRank data we see on our Google toolbars.

I know a guy…

So, if you know anyone who might know someone, who knows a guy, whos sister works at Google please pass along this blog post to them. In fact, if YOU are from Google, lets make this happen otherwise I will do what this guy did and just show up at Google with my idea!

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