Super Affiliate Marketing Blog

People always ask me what I spend my time doing all day. As if I have some set in stone schedule of what I do all day or follow like clockwork. Since taking my extended vacation from Affiliate Marketing, I’ve been able to free up some much needed time to focus on work related issues and topics, all for the greater good of WickedFire. That alone keeps me VERY busy. Even though I don’t follow any type of schedule, I do however try to spend at least two hours a day/night and many more hours on the weekend MANUALLY reverse engineering the Google Trust-Rank algorithm.

Let’s be very clear about this upfront. This is NOT something I would suggest for anyone to attempt. It’s reserved for only those who can sit at their computer for long period of time, and people with an abnormal sense of patience. I consider “market research” as one of my hobbies, so I figured this would be a fun little experiment. You know, to try and figure out how the TR algorithm actually works, since no one has really been able to figure it out. I can tell you from experience, had I known it would be this tough, I most definitely would not have started it. But now it’s become more of an obsession and passion rather than a fun thing to do or try. I’m already in the beginning of the 11th month of researching it, and I pretty much think that I’m in the 90%-95% completion stage right now. Only because the large majority of the over 270 different points/variables that I’ve logged and monitored keep looping or showing their ugly faces more and more often. I doubt I’ll ever get 100% of it, but I’ve definitely figured out most of the major parts of it.

The trouble with all of this is that even though I still consider this phase one of the project, I’ve also figured out that it can’t be automated. Which makes me really sad. Because after I switch over from research mode to outlining and configuration mode, I’ll have to come up with a way to do it by hand that works out to be the most time efficient and valuable process. I seriously never thought I’d be spending more than a year on this crap, but the primary reason I’m not quitting or giving up on it, is because having access to this type of information is basically like being given a checklist of how to make almost any site, new or old, ranked or not ranked, competitive niche or untapped niche into a ranking behemoth.

We’re talking about Trust-Rank, not the ever so familiar other algorithm of PageRank. TR controls everything. All of Google’s smaller or not so prolific algorithms that they depend on or test out for all of their services is somehow connected to their TR algo. Think of Trust-Rank as Google’s nucleus or brain for their technology. In fact, it’s so hush hush that they won’t even patent the Trust-Rank algorithm like they did with the PageRank algo because that would mean they would have to outline how it works and what it does, thus giving people access to very sensitive data that may compromise their whole world. It would also do them a lot more harm than good because competitors like Yahoo or MSN would loooooove to get their hands on this sorta stuff.

I tried speaking with some algorithm engineers I’m friendly with about it, and from what I’ve gathered, to date, no one has figured it out, completely that is. Without going the route I’ve been tracing on my own time, for the last 11 months to date, and spending over 900 logged hours (there are way more, but I stopped logging it at around 700′ish actually and just recently added up all of the logged data hours just to see how crazy it was), I honestly don’t think anyone else can figure it out, short of breaking through the security walls protecting the algorithm from even high level security clearance employees at the plex. It does however feel very good to know that I didn’t just waste all that goddamn time obsessing over what most people considered to be a myth or a ghost. I can tell you, it does exist, and it is a lot more powerful than I can ever try to define it. If there were any type of Noble Prize to be awarded in the sheer brilliance of this algorithm, Google’s engineers and theorists deserve it, without a question.

The beauty of Trust-Rank is that it’s not easy to attain, and can’t be gamed using almost any type of conventional or custom scripts, products or software on the market. I would highly doubt that anyone has any custom stuff for it either. The closest to gaming it using automation processes doesn’t actually produce a high enough result on the Trust-Rank scale as the people behind it were hoping. They’ve been able to get a very low trust level at most, and that doesn’t last for very long either. Domains with a very low to mid-level low Trust-Rank are the .edu domains that most Black-Hat SEO guys use for their 301 pages, you know, the fun with Viagra keywords and whatnot.

Many of these low-med low level trusted sites don’t do nearly as much damage as they can if they were a low medium level rank. Kind of amusing to see too, because plenty of them have very small amounts of PageRank associated on them, and yet, they can be exploited to dominate the crap out of trademarked keyword results for sites with a PR8+ and the TM keyword as the domain name. Let’s just leave it with the fact that I’ve only come across a chosen few high level Trust-Ranked domains so far, and most of them were ones I NEVER in a million years would have considered valuable by any means.

One of the other very interesting points I’ve found is that regardless of the Trust-Rank value that a domain has, and maybe this is being done on purpose by Google to hide data, but they will rarely show up in the indexed back-link output cache. When you do a search for back-links to any domain now, you’ll find lots more by using Yahoo than you would on Google, and most people associate that with the fact that Google will have it in there the next time they update PageRank. Well, I think that’s a load of crap. Because the only semi-automated process I have, which is using a macro to automate the process (it’s the ONLY process that doesn’t require unique commands or strings that I’ve come across this far), is when I look through the output from domains accepted into TR or domains who’s values have been increased or decreased, they’ll appear in THAT index, but many of them won’t appear in the link cache that everyone and their mother uses, regardless of how many updates or months have passed. Sometimes they do appear, but most times they don’t, but if they are in the TR index, then they count, if they don’t appear there, then they were either rejected for tripping one of the filters, or Google caught onto it quickly and rejected it automatically.

Does any of this even make sense to you? I swear, it almost gets me dizzy to have to always think about how it works, go through the process in my head, through a more visual process I guess, and then have to verbalize it here or to a friend without going into much detail that would compromise or leak anything. Dammit Google, you’re killing me!!

I’m sure this all sounds like link-bait or something out of a sci-fi story. I can’t even begin to scrape the surface of explaining how it works, or what causes one site to gain this but not that. It would drive me crazy, and even if I could, I wouldn’t, because this is way to valuable to be giving out or sharing with anyone. I have however shared very general points with some friends, many of them Black-hatters and some security and analytics people, and even then, it’s clear that I’m the only one with it.. yay!

I’m not making this post to brag or sell the data or anything like that. I don’t need or want your links either. I do plan on using all of the data and research for my own personal and financial benefit, I can assure you of that. None of the theories or points I’ve logged are in the Black-Hat zone either, for a change! They are all White-Hat, although some may definitely be considered borderline gray area or Gray Hat, but really, there are no rules or guidelines published that I know of for this, so it’s all kosher. Also NONE of these things will harm your site in any way, shape, or form. I’ve purposely tried to screw up my own dummy sites with it after they were blessed with low and medium Trust-Rank value, and although I did figure out how to add and subtract Trust Rank value, none of the domains were ever de-indexed/listed or banned for anything.

Phew. Long post. Almost.. done…

Now the part that is kind of ironic and what I hate most about doing all of this… The fact that I can’t use it for anything I’m working on now, because they are too public! PLUS, I removed myself from affiliate marketing, so I have no sites to use it to my advantage and bank from, UGH. I’ve also purposely screwed up my current search rankings for my blog and WF because of the amount of absolutely idiots it’s been attracting from searches, and they both already trusted authority sites!

So here’s how I’m going to bank on all of this, what I think is a MUCH deserved payout for myself, and without trying to pick a financial and/or legal battle with Google by selling it to their competitors (although I would not turn down hundreds of millions to billions if the offer came my way to sell it or shut up about it). I’m also NOT giving anyone access to the data I’m collecting or anything of the sort, so piss off if you think you’re going to see any of it here.

I’m not making an ebook, and not promoting it through WickedFire, but I am going to make a paid membership service based on ONLY linking for this. I’m also doing it separately from all of my other sites and projects. I will be doing this 100% by hand, manually. Therefor, since it should be common knowledge by now that I don’t like doing much work in general, and this has long outlasted it’s original term of being “fun”, I’m telling you all now, this is going to be available to around 50-100 sites at most. There are a bunch of things you need to know first before you consider joining. This is NOT like any other type of linking service you’ve ever seen or heard of either. So if you think I’m lying, I’m not going to sit around and try to convince you otherwise. If you are going to use what little money you have to your name on this, or even considering it, don’t bother, it’s way too volatile to be dependent on it.

Alright, let’s lay down the rules here.

First thing to get out of the way, pricing. Because that’s the first thing everyone looks for. No need to call or write for a quote. The truth is, I haven’t decided on a set price just yet. But the common advice has been “make it high because of the value”. I’m not making it high. I’m guessing it will be $250-$500 per month, OR just a flat fee of something like $400 one time fee per domain, and $50-$100 per month for maintaining a certain trust level. This is going to take a lot more planning and thinking than I’ve put into it, so let me get around to that soon. I haven’t set a limit on domains or keywords per user either, but I think that more or less depends on the amount of people I’ll be accepting. Because I do not want to be spending a shitload of time doing time intensive work for hours and hours on a shitload of domains, nor do I want to give potential competitors more TR value on their domains than I have on some of mine.

There is no tool for this. I have to do it by hand. It’s all manual. These aren’t paid text links. They aren’t forced links. They aren’t spammy or blogged links. They aren’t referrals or track-backs or anything of the sort. No RSS links. No social bookmark links. No tagging links. No “no-follow” links. No traded links. I’m not going into any sort of details, but I am promising that the links are voluntary, permanent (unless an act of God blah blah), and will have a serious long term effect on your rankings in both Google and Yahoo (why it works for Yahoo too is beyond me at this point, unless they found something out that I didn’t).

Let’s be sure you understand what the value is for owning a domain with a good value of Trust-Rank and authority level on it. This is NOT to be used on dummy sites, throwaway domains, landing page domains, black-hat SEO domains, none of that garbage. This should ONLY be used on domains that are already indexed in Google (just easier to work with and quicker). You will not have to edit or change anything on your domain. No need to re-write anything or add any type of content. No changes need to be made on your side, except that it better not be a 301 or 404, or blank page.

Whatever, I’ll make a new post about it later this week when I figure it all out. I’m not a fan of newsletters or alerts, so the only way you’ll be able to find out about this is from this blog. I’m most likely going to do it through my aojon.com blog too, just because I’m lazy like that.