Leslie Rohde . com - seo tag

"...Google will determine..."? Not on my site!

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:49:00 GMT

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.

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.
" ... 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.
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.
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.

SEO Trick - Sub-Domains vs. Directories

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 16:12:27 GMT

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.

Welcome to My [stomper] World

Fri, 23 May 2008 17:44:00 GMT

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.

If you are new to what we teach, checkout the freeline videos at http://www.stompernet.net/goingnatural3/ and it you are interested in getting this sort of help every day, get in line at http://www.windrosesoftware.com/snredux.

Jerry West Close to Historic Sponsorship Deal

Sun, 04 May 2008 03:13:00 GMT

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.

Static vs. Dynamic URLs

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 21:04:00 GMT

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.