The team over at MoneyCrashers.com has put together a new, dynamic ranking of the top financial planning blogs. You may already be familiar with Wisebread.com’s rankings, though Money Crashers’ approach is much more comprehensive.
Why should you care
Before I delve into how the rankings are determined, let me briefly touch on why you should care about any of this.
- Rankings motivate bloggers – A high ranking increases self-esteem and sense of worth, which translates into more and better blog posts. Also, a higher ranking leads to more advertising offers. Although we all like contributing to the community, eating becomes important at some point.
- Find new resources – There are a lot of great blogs and resources out there that you may not yet be aware of. Rankings are a consolidated view of what’s out there and how popular the content is. So when researching, you have a great starting place.
How Wise Bread does it
With all due respect to my colleagues at Wise Bread, their rankings are based on one narrow factor – Alexa Traffic Rank. Here’s a bit of background on Alexa.com. They are a “web information company.” Or in other words, they collect information about websites and make it available. For example, they collect information about visits to sites and then use that information to rank all of the sites in the world.
However, there is one major flaw with Alexa’s ranking system. In order to have Alexa track a visit to a site, the visitor must have the Alexa toolbar installed. So if I have a large reader base that does not have the Alexa toolbar installed, then Alexa does not rank me well. So although Wise Bread’s rankings report all kinds of information, the ranking itself is solely based on the Alexa ranking which is not representative of reality.
How Money Crashers does it
The team at Money Crashers increased the scope of the ranking to include a number of factors in hopes to present a more holistic view. Here’s a recap from one of Money Crashers’ founders.
“Our goal with this list was to make it very accurate by factoring in a variety of metrics into a single score rather than just ranking based on one metric like Alexa. It’s a lot more comprehensive that way. I think the list will represent great “goals” for the individual blogs because a quality ranking here will translate directly to the site being a very successful blog.”
Here’s an outline of the contributing factors.
- Feedburner Subscribers – The number of people who subscribe to the RSS feed. Is one indicator of readership.
- Twitter Followers – An indicator of the number of fans of the site.
- Alexa Ranking – An indicator of site traffic.
- Compete Rank – An indicator of unique visitors to a site. So is this blog growing and attracting new readers.
- Technorati Rank – An indicator of how popular a given blog is as compared to other blogs.
- Google PageRank – What Google thinks of a website or blog.
- Yahoo Inbound Links – How many other sites link to a blog. Meaning, do other sites find this blog valuable.
- SEOmoz mozRank – An indicator of how well the blog is optimized for search engines. Sites that are well optimized show that the owners are invested in the site.
- SEMRush Search Value – An indicator of the value of the site in dollar terms.
Also, another nice feature of the list is that each blog is categorized. So you can search for blogs based on categories like Credit Cards, Investing, and Frugality.
Get your badge today
If you are a financial planning blog, then visit the list today and get a badge to display on your site. Badges are an effective and easy way to demonstrate to readers how good your blog is as well as track how well you are improving. For example, Rabbit Funds is currently ranked #293. We are going to have to definitely do something about that.
Actually, if you are interested in receiving information about saving money, budgeting, and financial planning in general, then subscribe to the Rabbit Funds RSS Feed or Follow us on Twitter.
