This morning Andy Beal posted a follow-up to the announcement of our upcoming Feed Analytics Beta. You can read his dramatically titled missive here: FeedBurner May Suffer Glitches, But PostRank is Not the Answer to Our Prayers
Andy’s concerns are certainly valid if you aren’t familiar with how PostRank works. And certainly it can be a bit convoluted to understand if you haven’t been provided with the right explanatory examples.
I left a comment on the article, and will post it here as well. I’m sure if Andy has these misconceptions, he’s not the only one. And, of course, the invitation to contact us with question stands for all folks: email, twitter, Get Satisfaction.
Update: Andy has approved my comment, and replied as well. (I also left another follow up.) It’s not a conversation I have too often, but the skepticism does come up sometimes, so it’s good that others can see the dialogue. Cheers!
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Hi Andy,
Actually, none of those examples are errors. (Whew!) I’ll try and explain what you’re actually seeing there.
In the first example you list, I can’t fully see the two dates those posts were published, but I suspect those two posts you reference were published quite a while apart? We don’t compare each new post to every post you’ve published that’s in our system, for a number of reasons, so comparing the PostRank scores and metrics of two posts published a year apart, for example, wouldn’t be applicable.
If the two posts you reference had been published in the same week, for example, the second one would definitely have gotten a higher PostRank score. However, the second example post, ranked 4.1 was published after a number of posts that had gotten even more engagement — more than 5 comments, 2 tweets, etc. When the post ranked 7.0 was published, however, the preceding posts weren’t getting as much engagement, so 4 comments was pretty good performance at that time.
Regarding the second example, the short answer is that PostRank scores in the widget and PostRank scores on the website are calculated slightly differently. A more in-depth explanation of that is here: http://blog.postrank.com/2009/01/07/postranks-website-vs-widget/.
Hope that helps clear things up. Any additional or outstanding questions, please feel free to give me a holler any time. 