I am pleased to announce Invesp’s new application blogRank.

The application was inspired by a post I wrote few months ago, listing the SEO blogs. As bloggers, we always wonder how to measure our own progress and success. Different bloggers use different metrics. Many rely on RSS membership but I have seen blogs with thousands of RSS subscribers that hardly send any traffic to a blog they link to. Others such as Technorati rely on the number of links but we all know how links can be easily manipulated. Although numerous blog ranking systems exist based on different factors most seem to suffer in varying degrees from credibility/measurability issues. blogRank solves many of these issues by using a mathematical model to provide the ultimate ranks for blogs in a certain category.

For bloggers, blogRank shows you how well your blog compares to other blogs in your niche. The tool displays the top blogs in many categories. The final number of categories we will have in the tool is close to 500.

In its first release, blogRank will provide the top blogs in the following top level categories:

• Art & Literature
• Business & Money
• Computing & Internet
• History & Religion
• Interests
• Life & People

How does blog Rank work?

We collect data on over 30,000 blogs including:

• RSS membership
• Number of pages indexed by Google and Yahoo
• Number of incoming links via Yahoo
• External sites ranking (Technorati, Compete, Alexa)
• Monthly visitors
• Social sites interaction (Digg, SU, Reddit, Propeller, etc)

For each of these data points, blog Rank shows how blogs in a particular category rank. More importantly, blogRank uses a combination of all of the above factors to display the ultimate rank for blogs in each category.

Is  ChrisBrogan.com more powerful than Copyblogger?

If you look in the blogging category, you will notice that the 2nd blog ranked in that category is ChrisBrogan.com and the third is Copyblogger.

You may or may not agree with this ranking. We continue to work on the ultimate rank algorithm and collect more data every day. Of course, not all factors are assigned the same weight. Those which can be manipulated carry less weight in our ultimate rank calculation.

I expect the list of blogs indexed by blogRank to double over the next few months as bloggers add their blogs to the list. Well, take the tool for spin and let me know what you think!