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 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:
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.
Who knew such a thing was even possible — let alone enjoyable! Wife and son at Benihana following the usual engorging this entails. Missing is our daughter. In two dozen years you end up with a lot of pictures like this. Scanners and large disk drives are my current cure for Alzheimer’s. 😐 In each successive picture, my son is larger and larger. At 3 inches taller than me and 22 years to do it, I think he now fills as much of the frame as we can expect.
A critical Information Technology objective for most mid and larger companies these days is the integration of disparate business systems. The reasons are several, but Business Intelligence (BI) is a decent overarching label for all of it. The JSR-168 and related WSRP standards are intended to facility this but are they too late? Something old … new again Once upon a time, way back when a big disk was just M’s and RAM was merely K’s, our stone age solution to "integration" was to get different applications to at least run on the same terminal — and even that was rough. I don’t remember that we even had a name for that. Fast forward about 20 years and we call it "integration at the glass". Of course, it’s more than just glass. The real deal is that we now have a common UI framework (HTML/Javascript) and network communication standards(HTML) that allow even the oldest and crufty’st legacy apps [mostly] to appear together in harmony on the same desktop. So why build a portal when you already have a browser? Granted, that is something of a simplification. There’s still some tricky stuff to work out, like common authentication and inter-app state synchronization to name two, but those are arguably as easy to solve near the desktop as they are on the server — the network connection is simply not the barrier it once was. We no longer are looking at making the binary choice between thin-client and thick-client, but instead can spread application functionality almost arbitrarily across what was once the "great divide". The choice is where you do your mashing. If you mash using WSRP, we call the result a portal, but if you mash in the browser, you’re suddenly a Web2.0 social app — and likely with a better valuation too. 😉 Now, I do think there is an unanswered technology question here and that is the life cycle cost of these semi-thin clients — our tools are simply better and more mature for server style implementation approaches. This is changing. A real test case An application we recently built at StomperNet is split in just this way. It is composed of two user facing components implemented in Firefox that wrap local functionality as well as remote services hosted by a PHP server. There were some lessons learned, both positive and not, but on balance our approach provided solution features that would have been very difficult to provide any other way. With the maturation of XULRunner we can expect this type of application partitioning to become even easier.
As many of you know, in addition to running Windrose Software and continuing my search engine research, I’m also a faculty member at StomperNet. For about the last year or so, we have been closed to new students, but today that changes. At 3 PM Eastern time today we reopen. Not sure for how long. As I write this, we have a pool going in the office for how long it takes us to fill up.
On this day in 1978, the very first unsolicited commercial email, or UCE, was sent by Digital Equipment Corporation to hundreds (that was so the old days) of users of the Arpanet, the forerunner to the Internet.
In that one moment was born a whole new industry and way of life for millions of Americans. Thirty years later, business men and women build entire businesses based entirely on UCE, providing all of us (repeatedly) with many valuable offers and opportunities and generally enhancing life on-line. Indeed, UCE is now widely regarded as a venerable American tradition.
By the mid 90’s UCE came to be known as Spam, likely in reference to a Monty Python skit that featured another hugely successful American innovation — the canned meat product of that name created and marketed by Hormel.
It is only fitting then that on this anniversary of the birth of email spam, that Hormel should honor their on-line namesake with the appointment of an Internet spokesperson. Though no official announcement has been made, this reporter has learned through reliable sources that this new cyber delegate is to be none other than the “UCE poster boy” himself, Jerry West.
While Mr. West would neither confirm nor deny this “rumor” [wink, wink], he did say, speaking entirely hypothetically, “Since I’m the one that put the meat into email marketing, I figure I’m the perfect man for the job. I’m thrilled at the marriage of these two great American traditions, one in a can and the other on-line”.
When asked about the objections that some few, but highly vocal, users on the Internet have toward SPAM, Mr West pointed out that UCE is officially sanctioned in US law by the CAN-SPAM act, “I mean, if Spam was bad, they would have named it the CANT-SPAM act, right?” — a great example of the sort of insightful analysis Mr. West is best known for.
Sister Leslie Rohde, noted SEO evangelist and long time nemesis of Mr. West’s, had this to say of the announcement "I’m all for this new alliance. By far the best way to improve search results is to get Jerry to spend more time on email." Several other residents of the Google rectory, interviewed on the condition of anonymity, were also very excited at the news, describing it as “a sign of divine providence”.
Regrettably, repeated attempts to contact Hormel via email in regards to this story were unsuccessful, and ultimately resulted in a Spam complaint against the author.
The terms ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ do not correctly represent any real technological differences in how pages are delivered. The real issue is ‘clean URL’ or ‘messy URL’ — query strings is a common example. The engines are far better today at dealing with these URLs, so the historical advantage of clean URLs has dissipated considerably, but messy URLs still remain a problem and their use should be minimized.
Recently I was told that "there are no SEO Secrets" and to claim such a thing was deceitful. Hmmm, maybe. So I looked up the word "secret" — I already know what SEO means :-).
Secret:
done, made, or conducted without the knowledge of others;
kept from the knowledge of any but the initiated or privileged;
…
Now go look at some random search results. What percentage of these web masters have any clue at all about SEO? Maybe 5%. So if 5% of people know something, is it still a secret? If not, then when does something go from "secret" to "not widely known" and from there to "common knowledge"?
I’m not even going to propose a number. Insread, I’ll rely on the second definition: SEO secrets are known to the "initiated or privileged". And it’s easy to find out who they are: they are at the top of the search results!
This is a common question. I got it again today from an OptiSmarts subscriber:
I’ve found a lot of PR5 pages (and a few PR6 pages) on [my site] that don’t link to the homepage. I’ve now changed that and added nofollow to the unimportant links. What kind of a boost can I expect the homepage to get from, say 20 PR5 internal pages and a few PR6 pages pointing at it? Will I notice a difference?
That’s really three questions.
First, yes, you will notice a difference. All PR is additive so more is always "a good thing" but you might not notice it on the Google toolbar, because it is such a coarse measure. And with your existing home page PR of 6, the next step up at 7 is a very long way. But don’t let that stop you from optimizing it, because it is the "real" number that is used internally at Google, and 6.2 is still better than 6.1.
Which leads us to the next question: how much boost should I expect. There’s no tellin’. The SEO game is really just about going in the right direction and stopping when you get there. Figuring an ETA while enroute is not generally possible.
Which leads to the final question: when should I see the change? And that’s the worst news of all I’m afraid :-(. PageRank is the slowest changing aspect of Google ranking. I routinely see the PR on client sites take 3-6 months to adjust to major internal linking changes. It will not take that long when done from scratch — there I can usually get PR in 60 days — so it is the rearrangement of PR that takes serious time. Here’s part of the reason why.
I’m sure everyone has noticed pages in the Google index that have been 404 for 6-9 months and they are still cached and showing PR. Google appears reluctant to drop a page once it is indexed. Since the distribution of PR within your site is all about the way pages are linked together, your changes will not be complete until Google gets its entire picture of your site changed, missing pages, new pages, changed links and all. So long as the "old stuff" is hanging around, Google’s image of your site will be different than your new site design.
So, the simple answer to all of this is, just do it right and wait it out.
