Well I for one think so. As I have been traveling around the net for a while. I occasionally run around to a few seo/affiliate marketeers sites, I like to run over to AoJon.com and read up on his various trials through Googles new algorithm. Now not having actually looked at the algorithm I cant say for sure, but after reading Jon’s example on his site about TrustRank I have a very solid feeling his findings are 100% accurate. Just by following his trials with it on his site, you get an idea of how difficult it can be.

I have been studying link structures and MiniNets for the last few weeks. Just by his vague PR example he explains on his blog I feel I have a better understanding of how the tip of the TrustRank iceberg works. I’d rather not give away examples, but the simple matter is Jon found a way to give a semi-accurate if not completely accurate TR score for peoples websites and how to out score anyone else out there. I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on a copy of the TR algorithm just to have a look at what the work would be like deciphering it. I’ll leave that for another day. Overall though the message from Jon to every person working on SEO for their site is stop worrying about PR scores. Anyways check out his blog. Its some solid info, but dont bother him about buying his TR service, its all done now.

Link: http://www.aojon.com/

Sidenote: Even if you dont care about the TR algorithm, you should read Jon’s blog its pretty fun to read about him ripping on Ebooks and various other things.

So on my travels through PPC I have also decided to jump on Adwords and dump a little money into them as well.

Right away you notice how much more effective Adwords is for serving up ads. The interface is quick and responsive. Microsoft hasnt quite gotten AdCenter up to par on speed. The most exciting part of the jump into Adwords is  that right as soon as I started a campaign I immediately started seeing results. Within the first few hours after my account was setup I made a conversion. Which is something I have yet to see with AdCenter. This will be my first official day with adwords and I am still ahead on my earnings. Tomorrow I’ll go in and tweak the ads and see if I can increase that intake.

One major thing I like with Adwords is you arent just serving ads to the searches but on the “content network”, which basically means any site that serves adsense has a shot at showing off your ad. This kind of stuff reminds me of playing with stocks. Go in doing a lot of research, make your bids and see how things do. The tweak the results to get a better turn out. I havent been giving PPC my 100% attention, but its getting more of it now.

So I thought I would use Chitika Minimall on some of my websites and see if I can put together some side income on them. I havent used Chitika before, nor have I read anything about them. It will be an unbiased opinion. I’m interested to see how well their products will relate to my users. Pretty soon I’ll give you an update on how the progress is coming along and what I think of their program.

First Edit: Overall I like the navigation of the site and ease of setting up your ad blocks. Took me less than 5 minutes to log in find the ad I wanted to use, customize it and then toss it on one of my sites. I’ll give it a week or so before I pass judgement on well it will do for me. We’ll see.

Heres my Referral Link if you want to signup under me: Chitika MiniMall

Yes its really here! Green Operating System. HAHA You thought I was going to say Google Operating System. Someone finally decided to create an OS that engulfs the Google philosophy and adds some Google flavor to the mix. They integrated some Google goodies into the OS as a standard. This OS was built on the popular Linux Unbuntu platform, which means its a pretty well tested setup. Saying that I myself havent given this one a test yet. I might pop in an old hard drive of mine and try it out later. But for now this new OS is so well setup that the folks down at Walmart have decided to sell one of their computers with gOS installed on it.

Everyone is saying this is the Google operating system, but they would be wrong, or at least we can say for now that Google is not supporting this officially. They arent affiliated with this operating system. If you doubt me, then take a gander at the official site for gOS and their disclaimer at the bottom of the page.

Check out the gOS enabled computer:

http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=7754614

Download gOS here: http://www.thinkgos.com/files/gos-live-1.0_386.torrent

Recently I’ve been on a real kick of reshaping how I structure my sites links. Now I’m not talking about doing links for your users, which is something you should never ignore, but having a proper link structure for the search engine spiders to go check out. There are numerous benefits to getting this done right and numerous ways to go about doing it.

The one way I’ve been experimenting with as of late is using that fancy rel=”nofollow” tag that everyone in the SEO world has been raving about. With some simple PHP scripts and a little bit of my afternoon I was able to rip apart my sites and make them spider friendly. The basics of using the rel=”nofollow” tag is it tells the spiders what links to follow and how to go about cruising through your sites link structure. Now obviously you want to take some time and figure out the optimal structure for your site. I advise you go find a copy of the ebook Revenge of the MiniNet, and study the hell out of it. Its the basics for creating a great site structure. What are the benefits? Well if you can learn how to stretch the link structure correctly and by doing so your site will seem like more of an authority on your topic. Or you can get that PR a boost by putting the right weight of PR on each link.

I’ve seen some slight improvements so far in my major sites. Some jumped a notch up in PR in the last update due to this, I’m sure. If you’ve had some fun with link structures and the nofollow tag, lets hear your stories.

So as my days usually go, I was browsing around working on the next BIG thing when I jumped over to amazon to do a little research. What did I find, but a new layout on the Amazon site. They have been with the same scheme overall since before I can remember them being this big ecommerce shop.

Overall I really like the look. Its a fresh new design. The launch time seems perfect as it will give them plenty of time to work out any bugs that may arise before the holiday season really kicks into full swing. The navigation is a big improvement in my mind. Before you had to go through all this junk to get to what you wanted. Now its all there on the left bar where I need it, with some helpful quick links to some of the more popular categories. One initial piece of criticism would be they didnt leave a link on the page to go back to the old layout. As horrible as it may be to some users, there are a vast majority who dont like to change things up.

In this Web 2.0 world, Amazon is starting to take a stab at the styling cues that we are starting to become accustomed to. I give this design update a 9.0 on my scale. Whats your take on it?

Well since everyone is the blogosphere is talking about how they are seeing the big G screw them over on their sites. I have seen quite the opposite. Most of my sites went up in PR and even moved up some more spots in the SERPs. Why would this happen to me and not everyone else? No reason in particular. I take probably the same time if not more to do all my proper SEO and go through link values and site link structures. I take at least one day a week to go over my already established sites and try to see if I can go through and improve them even more. A little love goes a long way in SEO. How were you effected?

Occasionally I like to turn on a movie and just pump myself up on what I want in life and what I want to achieve. Well one of those movies is Thomas Crown Affair. No I dont want to be a thief, but nice try. I want to be at that status point. Be at the top of a company and do whatever it takes to keep it that way. I like to watch this movie just to keep some dreams going and inspire me to stay on top and keep pushing myself to the top.

What movies inspire you?

I’m a few days in(and about 2 months late) on this Thirty Day Challenge that Ed Dale and his buddies put together. I have to say its a pretty informative setup. They really walk you through all the basics of making a website and having it build up to earning 10$ in its first month. I would suggest anyone and everyone make some time, even if its 1 hour a day or so, and go try this out. Now I’m only 7 days into it. And at this point I’m really enjoying it.

Link: Thirty Day Challenge

So I have to hand it to Microsoft for making it really easy to set some geographic areas for your ads. This has to be one of the most important things when working with PPC traffic. Purely because you dont want to sell sausages to people in south-africa. Well maybe you do, who knows maybe they love the stuff. Coupling my products with the places its most popular is super important. For one I’m grabbing my demographic and secondly I’m getting some really direct and targeted traffic for my PPC campaign.

adCenter really makes all of that super simple to implement. Another helpful tip when working on PPC is to take advantage of gender and age targeting. If you can get some highly targeted traffic like that it will just further improve your conversion.

On the note of my ongoing PPC experiment, I havent made any conversions yet. I think this is mostly due to the cost of the bid on some of these terms I’m shooting for. Even though I have over 1k keywords for this campaign and all sorts of mispellings and typos I cant seem to break into the right bid point. So I may have to run some more adjustments and settings to get a better foothold in the market.