With the recent outages at Google I see a hundred of webmasters going mad just because Google maybe shut down their DCs for a maintenance upgrade to cope with recent traffic surges, it pretty obvious that webmasters, link traders and even clients have a need for an easy to understand valuation of a website...

not a mixup of dozens of technical terms... ONE number, ONE digit, ...

Yahoo had it's "webrank" as beta version out years ago already, but stopped it... Google maybe even killed it's pagerank...

However google has no reason to share it's internal, and probably new ranking values (based on new algos like Hilltop or TrustRank with us, which is why they probably turned it off...

Anyway...

what we need is a new common, and OPEN evaluation model, like a SEOrank or a BADrank for valuating sites fast and easy to compare (like the PR is/was) ... so basically a lot of numbers should go in...

I would appreciate to find some open source valuation toolkit to install somewhere, maybe even modify... but a centrally, trusted source is a hard thing to build up... as soon as the source and algos would be open it would be an easy way to exploit those ... as some say...

Really? Well - the page rank algorithms REALLY used where never published, but a huge community of SEOs and webmasters used it for it's purposes... faked PageRank, improved pagerank with artificial link building and link renting, etc. etc....

I don't think an OpenRank would be a more problem than PageRank...

But as long as it's an as simple quantitative ranking based on pages indexs, backlinks found, it's as simple to influence as PageRank...

And that's why I believe we have seen such drastic PR changes End of April - google implemented other - content based, quality based - data there... machine learning and text parsing stuf... YES: on page factors, content factors, not just sheer link power...

Such quality factors should go into an OpenRank project... but hey - if Google takes ages to gather and calculate all this data - what do you think it would take for an even small subset of sites?

and maybe Google just got rid of the PR datacenters to save on bandwidth, processing power and maintenance personell to improve their balance sheet?

However numbers that should go into such a model would be like

Alexa rank,
some other traffic rank numbers,
Yahoo BL
Google BL
mSN BL

combined with those numbers for the top 10 backlinking sites per SE

- that means aprox. 40-50 queries in total per site...

Has anyone built such an open source thing before or knows of a good and trusted toolkit to use/extend?

the discussion already started also on LinkSmile