McAfee has done something with the HackerSafe logo that I think totally crosses the line.  Thanks to Cresta’s Blog post and subsequent Tweet
for pointing this out to me.

Today, I am pulling the seal off of my sites; disabling all the domains in the ScanAlert control panel; and penning a nasty ass message to McAfee. Why you ask?

The change they made is to the page you get when someone clicks your the McAfee seal on your site. Right in the middle of the page is a link "Attention Shoppers" that leads to http://secureshopping.mcafee.com/. Excuse me!! WTF do they think they are doing?? I’m paying them for the seal AND giving them traffic?? I don’t think so.

This demonstrates a really disturbing lack of understanding on McAfee’s part. So bad in fact, I’m not interested in even discussing the point with them. Any partner of mine that could let something this brain-dead-stupid ever see light, simply can not be trusted.

Two SEO questions I get asked a lot:

• How important is the URL to ranking and
• Which is better, sub-domains or directories

In general, both have only minor impact on ranking (I think they are important to click-through) but I just saw an example of the latter that is worth some thought.

In searching for "swing treeview" (a Java thing) at Google, the top two results are treeview-java-swing.qarchive.org and java-treeview.qarchive.org and Google did NOT do the second as an indented listing which they would do if these were treated as being from the same domain.

If the same content were served via pages or directories at the root domain, the best this site would get is an indented listing, and even that is open to question.

This is likely a generally applicable result. Look at the results for searching for "blogspot" for example. Predictably, there are pages and pages of blogspot sub-domains. The previous example is no different.

The lesson here is that sub-domains really are different domains (which we knew).

The action item is to find out which is easier to get:

• Multiple listings from sub-domains or
• An indented listing from a single domain

I’ll let you know what I find.

UPDATE: So I’m a bit out of touch on this one, but McAfee actually backed away from what they were doing, in no small measure it seems from the stink she rasied. Read the full story at Cresta’s blog.

Oh, and I’ve restored the image to commerce websites.

I promise to just let this go — soon as I get this bit of satire posted!

For everyone who still wants to use the McAfee seal, here’s a logo providing "Full Disclosure" of what the ScanAlert "service" really means.

Enjoy.

LEGAL NOTICE to McAfee: This is satirical commentary covered by Fair Use. If you don’t like it, tough shit. Maybe you should have thought of that before pillaging your customers’ traffic.

In the StomperNet forums today I responded to a member who noticed a Google post here. Reproduced here is my acidic response.

That was the most useless, vague, non-actionable and *irresponsible* post I have EVER seen from Google. It looks like something from webmasterworld or the warrior’s forum. The examples used are just plain stupid and the sweeping generalization they make about Google somehow figuring out URL parameters is dangerously silly.

1. No one would consider rewriting a (so-called) dynamic url into a "static" one while retaining the session id. I mean DUH! If you are smart enough to even be able to enable mod_rewrite how could you not know to turn off session ids when serving content to bots? Ridiculous example that serves to paint all rewriting as somehow dangerous. Worst still, why would anyone rewrite like the example shown? That’s plain stupid.
2. " … Google will determine which parameters can be removed …" — You have got to me Sh*t**g me! Is there anyone who can spell S-E-O that would like to just simply trust Google to "determine" what URLs should be the same and which should be different?? Not me thanks. My site. I’ll decide. If they get it wrong, you get flagged with widespread duplicate content and they don’t tell you about it.
3. They leave completely unanswered the OBVIOUS (just look at SERPs) problems they have today with session ids — not so good at "determining" after all, eh? At every single StomperNet Live event we’ve held, I have reviewed at least one site that had pages indexed at Google showing multiple different session id values. This is a widespread problem for sites that serve session ids to bots and for Google to publicly post about "dynamic" URLs and sweep this under the rug while vaguely claiming to handle it borders on misrepresentation.
4. They also don’t say a damn thing about parameter order — another place they fail COMPLETELY to "determine". Example: p1=v1&p2=v2 leads to the same content as p2=v2&p1=v1 and this is a REQUIREMENT of the HTTP spec (named parameters are NOT positional so may appear in any order) but Google treats these as different URLs and will ignorantly and incorrectly index both URLs as different pages. This problems appears in several CMSs today, Endeca in particular has it bad.

Yahoo! announced today that they have an update rolling out. According to the posting, they will be making changes to “crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days and expect the update will be completed soon.”

Yahoo! has a history of completing the updates BEFORE they announce them, therefore, you can probably ignore the “next few days” comment. One change that I noticed is I dropped from #3 to #7 for the term “web marketing.”

The bottom line is, until Yahoo! can get more organic market share, changes they make to their algorithm will matter little.

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out this service from Google which allows you to have both video and voice chat through Gmail.

Sometimes when you ask for something and you get it, sometimes you regret asking so hard. And right now, many SEOs are doing just that with Google’s release of their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

The guide is 22 pages and here is my take on the guide:

Notable Quotes:

“Search Engine Optimization is about putting your site’s best foot forward when it comes to visibility in search engines.” – Page 2

Title Tag

Home Page Title Tag: Brandon’s Baseball Cards – Buy Cards, Baseball News, Card Prices which lists the business name and three main focus areas.

Sub Page Title Tag: Top Ten Rarest Baseball Cards – Brandon’s Baseball Cards

Good: Accurately describe the page’s content
Create Unique Titles for Each Page
Brief and Descriptive Titles

Bad: Using non-related text or “Untitled” or “New Page 1″
Duplicate Titles
Unhelpful Titles
Keyword Stuffing

Description Tag

Meta Description is important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages.

Good: Accurately describe the page’s content
Use unique descriptions for each page

Bad: Information with no relation to the page’s content
“This web page” or “Page is about baseball cards”
Only filling in keywords
Copying and Pasting the entire content into the tag

Best Practices for URL Structure

Good: Use words in URLs

Bad: Lengthy URLs with Session IDs
Using Generic Page Names like page1.html
Using Excessive Keywords like baseball-cards-baseball-cards-baseball-cards.html

Create a Simple Directory Structure

Avoid: Nesting subdirectories: “../dir1/dir2/dir2/dir4/dir5/dir6/page.html”
Using directory names that have no relation to the content

Provide one version of a URL to reach a document

Avoid: mixing non-www and www versions in your internal linking structure
Using odd capitalization in your URLs

Site Navigation

Create a naturally flowing hierachy

Don’t link every page of your site to every other page
Don’t make your users click 20 times to get to deep content

Use mostly text for navigation

Avoid: Navigation dependent solely on drop down menus, images or animations.

Use Bread-Crumb Navigation

404-Error Pages
- make sure you have them set up on your server
- don’t let search engines index them
- don’t provide a vague message like “Not Found” – use a custom 404 page
- don’t use a design that is not consistent with the rest of your site

Earlier this week Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang called it quits. The results? Their stock soared. It is bad enough thinking the company would be better off without you, it is another to have that reality confirmed by Wall Street the next day.

Yang’s “downfall” was pinned on his inability to close the deal with Microsoft. I disagree. There have been waves of bad decisions, including indecision on Yang’s part over the years. I cover these issues in my “How Yahoo Screwed Itself” blog post from last year.

eBay has recently seen a sharp drop in traffic as they cut their affiliate stream and Google ad spend.

When you are a default category leader you no longer compete against others in your category. You compete against other categories. Google and Amazon.com understand that. Microsoft maybe. eBay no.

eBay could have used the last decade to create communities around buying, selling, and collecting…taking a slice of any transaction as they turn buyers to sellers or sellers to buyers.

• They could have offered awards for collector of the month, seller of the month, buyer of the month, and done interviews with the winners.
• They could have a section called deal hunting where they offer tips on how to find the best deals.
• They could have a section called “good as new” where people talk where people talk about old items that are a bargain, and in some cases even better than new.
• They could have allowed sellers and buyers to build editorial communities and collections on the eBay site. Control the conversation and control commerce.
• What if eBay could have got you to tag just about everything you owned, and then told you roughly what it was worth (based on recent transaction data) and had you put a buy it now price on it? CueCat was a failure, but eBay has a much better platform to market such a device on.

Instead they did nothing. They lost a decade to improvements in search, Amazon.com, open source software, blogs, and the rest of the web.

Rather than improving their network feedback mechanism and making a deeper network, the new eBay strategy is to try to be more like Amazon, but that won’t work. While eBay spent a decade alienating buyers and sellers (with no innovation, shifting fees, encouraging a market lemons, etc.), Amazon was off building user loyalty. And now Amazon is out working public relations with a holiday customer review team and extending their platform in new dimensions – offering digital downloads, the Kindle, selling utility computing, and selling their shopping platform.

Staying competitive is more of a mindset than an event. The decay happens long before it impacts revenue. And by the time it impacts revenue there isn’t a lot of time to fix things.

“All Truth passes through Three Stages: First, it is Ridiculed…
Second, it is Violently Opposed…
Third, it is Accepted as being Self-Evident.”
- Arthur Schopenhauer (1778-1860)

A business model that contains subtle white lies that are familiar and easy to like is often far more profitable than a business model built around attempting to change people’s identities. This is precisely why so many business models are built around for Christians, for bloggers, or for charities.

As an entrepreneur it is worth considering the above quote when thinking about new business models, new platforms, new formats, and new algorithms. You could spend all your time trying to prove your vision of the truth, or modify it slightly so that others are willing to do the work for you. Your choice.

Start with a socially active core that identifies with what you have to offer and give them the tools to help spread your message.