I removed Money crasher badge | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

Although a particular popularity metric is fixed, the weight that each particular ranking system assigns to each may vary greatly.  I guess each site values different social sources with greater importance and therefore the rankings for each site vary as well.

My ranking dropped significantly too.   Looks like a lot of us are tied at #422.    I decided to remove the badge too.  

I dont like posting those badges, mostly because my rank is pretty low on both and I dont know what raising it will get me.  

I'm not even on it! So I wasn't even invited to the party lol

Thanks for the clarification! Cheers.

Hey Sam,

Thanks for the note.  I don't think it comes down to "negatively marketing your blog" here.  It's all relative really.  If you're a new blogger just starting out, it'd be helpful to show that you're part of a community and to show your progress over time.  Sure, a rank of #266 obviously means that you're not the most highly trafficked site out there, but what if the site went from a rank of #500 to #266?  Isn't that something that you should be proud of, and something readers would be impressed by?

I think it's similar to how the Feedburner subscriber count chicklet works.  It's not advantageous to display it if you have less than say 100 subscribers, but beyond that it's helpful to show that you have a decent readerbase and that you're growing over time (i.e. just because you don't have as many readers as TechCrunch doesn't mean you shouldn't display your count, right?).

Same with Yakezie here – everyone starts off as a lowly white belt which might signify that they're "newbies" or don't know what they're doing, but does that mean bloggers shouldn't join the community and put up the Yakezie badge?  No, I think it's helpful to be a part of something like this, and shows progress and growth over time.

As for your point about seeing how many top 25 blogs have the badge up (haha, I saw that you changed this from 50 down to 25), I don't really think that's a good measure.  A lot of the sites up there are much larger (many run by big corporations), and they're there more as a measuring stick for independent bloggers.  In fact, a lot of them are so big that they're not interested or don't have time to contribute to the community or put up any badges (e.g. how many of those top 25 are in Yakezie?).

This is a question for everyone: Since I see rank as a sticking point for the badge, would it be helpful if we offered something where it displayed the Score rather than the Rank?  We could also put something together that's just an image (without any dynamic numbers on there).  Let me know your thoughts!

Financial Samurai said:

An honest question here: Why would you want to negatively market your blog? It's one thing to be in the Top 10 or Top 25 of some kind of ranking system, or one that takes a lot of effort just to get on, no matter what your ranking. It's another thing to say you are ranked #266. I haven't checked out MC's system for a while now, and I'm sure there's some good stuff. Just check to see how many of the Top 25 blogs have the badge and think about why this is.

The best way to market your blog is to highlight your strengths and work on your weakness until they can be highlighted. What am I missing here?

Thx

No prob, guys.  Happy to help and clarify things.  Yeah, normally we're pretty good at catching any issues when they happen so I'm surprised I missed this one.

Also, the new update is live now, and the ranks should be back to normal again.  We'll run it again in the next day or so, so that the +/- numbers aren't so out of whack.

Let me know if you have any other feedback!  As for as update frequency, what do you guys prefer?  Is weekly good, or would you want more often?

MoneyBeagle said:

Thanks for the info and clarification.  Perhaps your system would allow for some sort of flag when a site rises or drops by a substantial number, which would probably indicate some sort of collection issue that could be looked into. 

Watson Inc said:

Thanks for the clarification! Cheers.

The biggest problem I see is that N/A causes a site to shoot up in ranking. There are tons of sites with 3-4 N/As. 

Can't you fix this somehow?

I also took the badge down. I don't really want to display #205. It implies there are 204 sites better than mine.

Why don't you arrange the sites by category. A blog shouldn't be ranked with coupon sites. There are tons of coupon sites on your list and most of them are in the top 100.