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.

Let’s start with the category that includes blogs about science. If you visit this category and visit any of the top 10 blogs, you will be well on your way to some great science blogging.

Similarly, let’s say that you want to see a list of the best search engine optimization blogs and you navigate to the SEO category. Again, we have to say that we’re extremely proud of the blogs that get displayed on the front page of this category. You simply can’t go wrong with any of them, and collectively they are the best of the SEO category.

As the EatonWeb directoy grows, more and more categories will be exactly like the two above. And to be honest, many categories are almost there. Consider the following list:

The best celebrity blogs
The best technology blogs
The best money blogs
The best food blogs
The best travel blogs
The best sports blogs

If you’re looking for the best blogs in any of these categories, EatonWeb isn’t a bad place to start!

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!

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.

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.

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.

Any decent SEO knows that by and large, directory submission has fallen out of favor. But why? There’s a simple reason. Most directories don’t contribute anything to the web. Most directories are link farms.

So how could we be different? Well, we went the virtual whiteboard and brainstormed and came to the conclusion that a successful directory needs to matter. A successful directory needs to contain useful information. It needs to separate out the wheat from chaff, so to speak.

From the very beginning we were determined to build a directory that measures various blog attributes that are indicators of quality. We settled on establishing 2 primary blog metrics: one that measures a blog’s strength and one that measure’s a blog’s momentum over time. Then we pull the two of these metrics together for an overall score.

For us, measuring a blog’s strength was not sufficient. After all, a blog with lots of backlinks and technorati references might be stagnant, or losing ground, but still appear “strong” – so measuring a site’s strength across time (it’s momentum) became our goal, and we hope that this metric becomes our trademark.

So why is the EatonWeb blog directory different? Because EatonWeb matters. EatonWeb lists the best sites first, and lesser sites last. So if you’re looking for the best celebrity blogs, we show you the strongest and also the fastest growing.

So why does this matter? Imagine that you’re an advertiser looking to advertise on celebrity blogs. One thing you could do with EatonWeb is look for celebrity blogs that are either strong, increasing in strength, or, a combination of both.

EatonWeb matters because it organizes its data according to the measured quality of a blog. So you can be sure that when you’re looking for the best blogs in any given subject, EatonWeb gives you the data you’re looking for.