What’s your blog’s worth?

Well, good question. Can you know it for sure? There are many third party tools for approximately estimating the “worth” of the blog, or rather the URL of the blog.

Google PageRank. Most popular parameter that everybody look at nowadays. PageRank indicates the number of incoming links, i.e. links that point to your URL. Most websites do get a PR with time, however, it also depends what PR websites link to you. For example, one link from PR8 is far better than 10 links from PR3 sites. Roughly speaking your PR indicates how “important” your website is on the internet. Naturally the high is the PR, the better, but don’t forget that it’s so hard to reach PR7 (not to mention PR8+). Even the most successful blogs normally fall in the category between PR4 and PR6. If you have nothing better do to, I recommend reading a good explanation of Google PageRank On WikiPedia, or, of you are less bored, just check your PR here.
Alexa Rank. Another very popular tool that estimates the traffic of the domain. It’s not endlessly accurate though, as it only gathers information from surfers who use Alexa toolbar (Do you? I don’t.) so it’s pretty approximate and is not something I’d rely on, nonetheless, if the website’s Alexa ranking is small (here, unlike Google PR, the smaller is the number, the better) it’s safe to say that the site has decent traffic. If you want to have a general idea, below 100,000 is normally “good”. Should you decide to educate yourself more on the subject, again, Wiki is the answer.
Technorati Rank. Measures the number of blogs linking to your blog. Just like with Alexa, the lower is the number, the more popular is the blog. How accurate is it? Again, not flawless. If someone placed a link to you, Technorati bot pinged the backlink, and then he removed the link, it will still remain in your Technorati profile as an incoming link. I faced it quite a few times when I just released my WordPress themes, some people uploaded my themes, and then removed the footer link with my credits, (normally by the time I dropped to visit the link was already gone, but I could recognize my theme + thanks to Technorati for heads up). Some of these website still do good to my ranking, though this does not reflect the blog backlinks in real time.

Blog Juice. Free tool developed by the providers of Text Link Ads, calculates the “worth” of your blog based on links from Technoarati, Technoarati Rank, Alexa and incoming links from Bloglines.

And now to the most important questions, what counts the most? Ideally it’s good to have it all, but let’s put it this way. If your website is PR7, you can very easily sell text links to advertisers for no less than 150$. If you have no PR, the chances of selling advertising space are damn slim. Ever seen someone paying for billboards on cemeteries? If your blog juice is high, you can sell text links via TLA network for a much better money, but for this, you need good Alexa and Technorati, so here is the joint point where things get connected and depend on each other. If you decide to sell your domain and will go for a professional appraisal they will calculate the indexed pages in Search Engines and PR as well as traffic and Alexa, not to mention the worth of the domain itself. You can reply on anything you choose, just not on online tools that estimates the worth of your website. Want an example? According to LeapFish, this blog, toptut.com, worth 76$, which is slightly underestimated. If you chech, however, with Business Opportunities tool, we will see that this blog worth $62,663, which is slightly overestimated. There are tons of other tools and ALL will give you a different, confusing information. Most important is to produce good results in Search engines, have your pages indexed, work towards improving your PR and, most important, work on unique, useful content, then your blog will be… priceless.