There are probably a hundred widgets and tools out there that try to assign a price to the value of your website or blog.  Whether they are accurate or not doesn’t really matter as much as what types of information they look at in order to compute that value.  These are roughly the same algorithms that determine the value of a link or a review from your blog.

So, what public signals of value, audience, and authority can they look at in order to compute your site or blog’s worth?

- Alexa (easy to manipulate)
- Yahoo Site Explorer’s backlink count (hard to manipulate unless you go on a link buying spree)
- PageRank (hard to manipulate and updates quarterly, at best)
- Del.icio.us bookmarks (pretty easy to manipulate, but Yahoo is getting smarter about spammy Del.icio.us accounts)

And then there’s Bloglines Subscriptions.  This is probably the easiest way to make your site more valuable.  Now, I’m going to assume that most of you will be hardworking, content churning bloggers who will try to raise this number organically with sweat, thought leadership, and better placement of your Add to Bloglines button.  The rest of you, well, I don’t think I need to give you any specific direction…

I’m going to stick with the first option for this blog but for some other projects, it’s just too easy to manipulate to be left alone.

Good luck and, uh, add me to your Bloglines if you found this useful.

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