Request for some transparency on IndiRank

There are a lot of posts regarding issues people are facing with IndiRank. I too have a few questions to ask, again related to the IndiRanking of the blogs. If it isn't a secret recipe , I would like the IndiTeam to let us know how the ranking is done, so that a lot of questions can be resolved. I particularly have some issues with ranking of my blog. Though, I don't take it too seriously, so haven't bothered to open a support ticket in this regard, and create more problems for the already overburdned IndiTeam, still, there are a lot of people, who, I think take it a bit too seriously.

IndiRank is a top secret! 

The factors used for ranking are already shown on your stats page. The only thing we do not know is the weightage of each factor and the mean and variance of the gaussian distribution that they use to rank us! ( I just wanted to use the word Gaussian  ) I read somewhere that there are two other secret metrics that are used! 

I too have been observing a lot of discrepancies with the actual stats and the ones being shown on the stats page. For a past few months (three to be exact), I have been seeing a drastic fall in the external juice passing links for my blog, which, as far as I know, increases with the age of your blog (in case your blog is active), in my case it's decreasing, even with an active blog. I would also like to know what External Juice Passing Links are (according to IndiBlogger), because as far as I know, it must me some link on some third party site, sending traffic to your blog or site (In my case, my Bing Webmaster Dashboard shows the number of inbound links at almost a 1000 times more than what I get to see on my IndiRank stats page).

IndiRank takes the stats of incoming links from moz. So, the problem will be with them and not with IndiBlogger. The reason why your Bing / Google Webmasters account shows more number of backlinks is that they crawl more pages than moz but since analytics of GWT and Bing are available only for the person to whom the website belongs, they can't be used in ranking. As fat as I know, moz is the most accurate open one as far as backlinks count is considered. Alexa is even worse.

Secondly, after the latest IndiRank update, the stats (my alexa rank) has a drastic difference of a million. My theory regarding this was that Indibot must be collecting the stats daily for a particular month, and an aggregate of all those daily ranks would serve as the alexa rank for that month. This was because, the alexa rank that is being shown for my blog is the one, I had in mid August, while on the day the latest IndiRank update happened, my Alexa Rank was lower by more than a million. I had a discussion with Mr. C. Suresh too, regarding this, but that couldn't clarify my confusion on the ranking system. 

As far as I know, the stats are not collected daily. 

Then there are a lot of questions among the IB newbies regarding the IndiRank, and the procedure one has to follow to get one (though most of us know that there's no such procedure to get an indirank). A lot of people face issues with their feeds. Though, I haven't ever faced this issue, I've seen pretty old (old in the sense of joining IB) members facing issues with their blog feeds, and thus, resulting in missing IndiRank, or some other issue with it. So, I would like to have some information on this too (as to why there are issues with feeds of people?).

The problem with feed in 25% ( replace 25 with whatever you want  ) of the cases is because auto detection of feed is not provided by their blogs. In the remaining cases, it is probably some error on the part of IndiRank program. But the new addition of the Fix My Rank button is a good and those who didn't get a rank can get it without any hassle. My question is if feed detection fails at the first trial, why doesn't the RANKER try to detect it again? Or does it do it already? 

Lastly, if this is something, IndiTeam won't like to share with us, it is okay with me. I totally understand that sharing all the things, I asked for, above, might put the IndiRank at risk, as we are very clever bloggers, and are much more clever at exploiting vulnerabilities.

There is already a vulnerability that you can exploit. Don't post anything on your blog. Simply keep changing the dates in your feed to recent dates. 

Not to mention, if the IndiPolice feels that this thread doesn't serve the purpose, they can freely delete this thread. Frankly speaking, I didn't search for a similar thread that would serve this purpose, though, I haven't found any such thread, so posting one here. In case such a thread already exists, please point us to the right direction.

Funny! 

My reply is longer than your post! 

copy+paste

No, I dragged and dropped. 

Thanks for your reply Mr. Suresh, the date on the alexa rank clears the part of confusion on the IndiRank. I wonder why I haven't checked it out as of now.

But, is it really the date that is being shown as May 13, June 13, July 13, and Aug 13? It seems to me as the month followed by the year, '13. Because the same pattern is repeated in Frequency of Posting, and Last Updated sections of the IndiRank stats page, and I'm damn sure that Indi doesn't gather all those stats on 13th of every month. 

You're right. Its not the date, but the month. But the point still holds true. There is a difference when the software checks your Alexa rank and other stats and when ranks are published. By the time you check the status, all these stats may have undergone a big change.

Ah! My point was related to both month and date. My bad about the date - I was mislead by the coincidence of 12th being the date Alexa updates its rank comprehensively and the year in which I was checking all this up. But, such an acute observer as you could have also noticed the month and seen it was August that the alexa was picked for and there was no point in comparing that with your latest alexa ranks of September :)

@CK: I am sure about Alexa so if you are in doubt only YOU are in doubt :) It is NOT Indi which reworks Alexa nor did my comments about methodology in the other thread relate to Indiblogger working it out. The methodology is adopted BY ALEXA and the rank released on the 12th of each month is more accurate. The daily updation of alexa are approximations.

Indiblogger picks the Alexa rank as of the 12th of the month and uses it for working out the Indirank. (I think websites like Indiblogger can subscribe to Alexa and receive data about Alexa ranks of the blogs they intend to cover - and, so, it is not like the Indi-bot has to go around collecting alexa ranks, if such subscription has been done. And, of course, indi will be supplied with Alexa ranks for all blogs only once a month and NOT daily in this case). That is NOT an assumption on my part. If you clicked on Indi-stats on your dashboard and bothered to look at the graphs below, you will see that the Alexa graph's X-Axis shows the date for which Alexa is picked up. Why I think you have not even bothered to do that - and, despite my mentioning it - is because you would not have felt the need to ask about 'method of ranking' with respect to Alexa had you done so.

I have no comments on any of your other points. Just wanted to clarify that I do not share your uncertainty about Alexa - since you have mentioned my name in your thread and given the impression that I felt as inconclusive about it as you did.

I'm extremely sorry, in case you felt bothered by me using your name, for my confusion on that alexa rank part. I never meant to present you too as being inconclusive about that part of IndiRank. I have updated the post.

I completely agree with you CK... some of things that do not work the way they are supposed to it is questionable. Classic example being the juice passing links.. however you can also consider an alternative view that the pages that used to link to your site may have gone down, though this alone may not cause a huge dent in your juice passing links.

I agree with your view that if the number of pages linking to my blog's content falls, the juice passing links will go down, but, I suppose you ignored the thing that one of the webmaster's tools I'm using (Bing Webmasters, to be exact) shows a totally different picture. It shows the inbound links to be around 1K times more than what is being shown here on IB stats page. Even if considering the alexa's stats of total number of sites linking in to my content, the number is three times more than what is being shown here in my IB stats page.

Certain things are best left unknown.

I respect your view on this issue TF, and yes, there are some things best left unknown, however, I intended to know this because, there are a lot of questions raising on IndiRank, and I too have a lot of these questions.