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.

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.

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.

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.