The goal of EatonWeb was to create an algorithm that would automatically filter the best blogs in any category to the top of that category . We figured that we could add value to the web as a directory that listed the best blogs first. Isn’t that what directories are for in the first place? To be reliable guides to the best of the web?

While we still have a ways to go before we’ve populated our directory to the point of satisfaction, there are a few categories where we feel that you can get a clear glimpse at the success of our algorithm and it’s automatic ranking of sites.

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EatonWeb was honored to be mentioned in the Search Engine Journal’s list of 20 Essential Blog Directories to Submit Your Blog To. It’s good to know that our hard work is paying off.

If you’re wondering which blog directories to submit to, and looking for the authoritative list of killer blog directories, look no further than Search Engine Journal’s list.

And, by the way, please don’t waste your time with those submissions to 100s of directories either! You DON’T want to be part of link farms. You DO want to be part of the best directories on the planet.

And EatonWeb is one of those directories!

EatonWeb uses a combination of metric factors to determine the value of a website. However, we are planning to phase out PageRank in our metric over the next 12 months because, quite honestly, we no longer feel that it’s an accurate reflector of site value. Not to mention the empirical observation that our directory rankings were more accurate before the recent PageRank penalties were handed out. We’re doing this for the sake of quality….the quality of our directory.

Google has been systematically introducing the equivalent of theoretical epicycles to its display of PageRank to the public, and we think it’s about time to face the facts. You can’t manually penalize hundreds of influential sites and expect to be used as a reliable source of information any longer.

In fact, we believe that PageRank epicycles are chinks in the Google armor and that Google needs to make a major strategical decision going forward to preserve its influence in the webmaster community. And in the end, it’s going to come down to whether Google can accurately determine the value of each independent link, buffering the outflow of poor quality links, rather than inaccurately painting an artificially depressed picture of site authority.

Yes, it’s true. Google has dinged lots of blog directories. There are lots of bad directories. But the fact is that Google has now dinged EatonWeb. And EatonWeb is a good directory (unbiased, of course!).

We can understand Google’s desire to get rid of link farms and bad directories. But we honestly believe that EatonWeb offers something unique and worthwhile as far as directories go.

The EatonWeb blog directory is unique because it dynamically ranks blogs in each category according to perceived strength and momentum. In other words, we put the best sites first. This is not really done well, anywhere else. The Google directory organizes sites by pagerank, but we feel that EatonWeb actually does a better job of ordering sites than pagerank.

Sorry to vent, but we feel that the recent decision by Google to “ding” directories went overboard and has artificially hurt sites that didn’t deserve it.

I want to show you one of the coolest features of the new EatonWeb.

As you may or may not not know, Google’s PageRank metric is hugely popular but does very little to differentiate between sites that have the same PageRank. On top of this, it shows some sites that are clearly less important, as having more importance than other sites.

Let’s take a few examples. First, we’ll start with two technology blogs that both have PageRank 7.

The first is Ars Technica. The second is called Have Laptop Will Travel. Again, remember that both of these blogs have a PageRank of 7. But in EatonWeb, their strength metric is very far apart. Ars Technica has a strength of 79.03. Have Laptop Will Travel has a strength of 36.21. In otherwords, we calculate Ars Technica to be more than twice as strong as Have Laptop Will Travel.

So what gives? Well, the fact is that EatonWeb’s blog metric has a much higher level of resolution and, as far as we know, takes into account more than “linkjuice” when cacluating the measured importance of a blog. In fact, this is great evidence that EatonWeb does a much better job at telling you which of these two technology blogs is the more influential one.

In our next example, we’ll consider two sports websites. This time, Google is way off on their measurement of blog importance (they get it backwards).

The first site is called Soccerlens and is one of the premier soccer/football blogs on the internet. It is regularly in the top five of the Performancing Top 20. PageRank measures this blog as being a PR 4 while EatonWeb measures its strength as being 37.71.

The other sports blog to consider is called Philly Sports Net. This blog has a PageRank of 5 (higher than soccerlens) but an EatonWeb strength of only 22.15.

Notice the disparity. In reality, Soccerlens is a much more important and successful blog than Philly Sports Net. But Google tells us that Philly Sports Net is more important. EatonWeb gets it right. Google has it wrong.

So there you have it. Some real world examples of where EatonWeb’s metric gives you a better sense of a blog’s importance than PageRank.