As I wait for yet another install of Magento to delete itself, so I can install it yet again, I am reminded of my tech support days. Then, as now, this Open Source stuff is all about “been there, done that“. The more times you’ve done it before, the better you are at doing it. No matter what level of conceptual understanding you have, you still have to have “done it” in order to be able to “do it” again.

Magento on Dreamhost. Magento on 1and1. Magento on my dev server. Magento on my Redhat server. Magento on my local XAMPP installation. They are all slightly different, and now I know exactly why. But I still have to track down every instance of the use of HTTPS to enable use of a shared SSL cert (1and1), or manually configure the secure/non-secure basedir settings, and start with admin console unsecured, etc etc etc. Yes, I know it’s a great package. Yes, I understand why I have to manage these peculiarities, and I totally support the cross-platform approach that necessitates the compromises. But still, must I install it again?

The next time someone asks me “what do you mean by SEO for Magento. It’s already search engine optimized, because it runs on Zend Framework” I will likely switch from Pinot Noir back to Jameson. Yes frameworks are about best practice and flexibility. And SEO is about competitive webmastering. You use ZF as is, while your brother exploits the __call method to make sharper URLs, my cousin uses a Controller plugin to hack URLs before they get to the router, JoeSEO deploys good ole regex rules in Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Regex, and I struggle with enforcing strict URLs and a custom route class.

Question: Who will win in the SERPs?

Answer: The one who ties it all back to the shopping cart in a fashion most effectively tuned to the market, as defined by Google.

In a way that is portable, and flexible, and adjustable, of course. Sound familiar? Go figure.

Note: A few days ago, after proclaiming for many months that paid links are not allowed and arguing what does and does not constitute “payment” for links, Google has finally cleared up the confusion around the use of the nofollow attribute by publishing a living demonstration of the right way to barter direct back links. Using the very popular Google Webmaster blog as an example (which has a very high page rank), Google demonstrated the proper way to use direct backlinks, without nofollow, in reciprocity. Quid pro quo.. this for that… direct back links as a reward for participation.

And so, in the Spirit of Google’s example, keeping in line with the living example of correctness, I hereby thank my loyal Sphinners who pushed my post over 300 Sphinns at the search marketing community Sphinn.com:

Thank You (with links) Bionic Sphinners

Setting up and running a website is getting easier and easier, and it’s wonderful to see so many new webmasters sharing their voices with the world! For you as a webmaster it’s pretty easy going… until you run into an issue that you just can’t seem to solve on your own. Maybe some technical issues were flagged in your Webmaster Tools account; maybe you’re just trying to get your robots.txt to block a certain part of your site; or maybe someone reported that they got a virus while visiting your site (gasp!) maybe you want to get a ton of Sphinns on a post to make the Greatest Hits list. All of these issues can come up and sometimes it’s helpful to have a helping hand when diagnosing and solving it.

Our Google Webmaster Help Group Our Sphinn community is a great place to get help. There are many webmasters active in our group, friendly and ready to help others, often with first-hand experience. They can show you what might be wrong, show you how you can find answers in the future, and point you towards a solution that you’ll be able to use. They Sphinn your posts!

Just recently a webmaster came into the groups with a website that was having strange problems in need of more attention. Less than 20 minutes later, one of our dedicated members replied and pointed the webmaster to hidden content that was placed on their site by someone else Sphunn the post! Finding that Being ignored is bad enough; but not getting Sphunn finding it is even more frustrating.

While there are lots of helpful people in our groups, we have some that really stand out as being exceptionally active, helpful, competent and friendly. They volunteer time and energy to help build a great community and to help webmasters all around the world. In order to more publicly recognize their contributions, we’re calling them our Bionic Posters Sphinners. We want to highlight their outstanding efforts and thank them for the sound advice Sphinns they’ve offered to so many.

We wanted to take a minute and send a shout out to our Bionic PostersSphinners:

Thank you all for helping to make the Webmaster Help GroupJohnon.com post such a success!

Note: It will take some time to get everyone listed, so you can either be patient or post a comment with your details, matching your Sphinn credentials above.

Thanks Ken. That was hilarious.

Adobe has announced PhotoShop Express, a “free” online image finishing system that YOU can use to cleanup, sharpen, filter, remove red-eye, and do a host of other things to your photos, which you can also publish online, share, and embed. It’s all “free” as old-school Adobe defines “free” : no charge, free, gratis, wonderfully replete of expense…. as long as you hand over ALL of your equity in your intellectual property.

That’s right. All of your rights to your own images, as per this part of the terms:

Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

Now if it isn’t bad enough, take a look at how they deliver that small print information. It’s not part of the Terms you see when you bother to click the (tiny) “terms” hyperlink on the sign up page. It’s actually in a separate “additional terms” document that is “incorporated by reference” in the original (lengthy) terms document. And this “additional terms” document is far more lengthy than the initial one… about 8 screens worth of scrolling legalise on my 1600×1200 display. Oh and there is yet another lengthy document “incorporated by reference” in this document, which I didn’t have the patience to read.

As Adobe seems to be saying via this release: “Adope. It’s all about US. Screw you.”

The Google blog (which routinely uses the “nofollow” attribute according to Google’s guidelines for link management, has just posted a set of direct backlinks to the people they are calling “bionic posters” in the Google help forums. These back links are not nofollowed. They are genuine, live, link juice passing links. They are presented as a reward for participation… for helping Google’s customers for free, by answering questions in the forums.
When Google started the ridiculous “paid links are evil” debate, I was disappointed that such a bright group of kids would step into such an open-ended, impossible argument. When the search optimization community jumped into that trap yelling “Google is not the Government“, I was disappointed that so much energy would now be wasted on a negative, endless argument that would lead nowhere. Of course back links are “traded”, and of course they are “bartered” and of course there would be a micro-economy around the exchange of links based on some currency, and yes, of course money would represent the currency of choice for everyone not looking for a relationship at this time.

So I crafted a post for the new marketing community Sphinn and announced I wanted to get a phenomenal amount of votes. I was asking for votes, and would thank my voters with a back link. Of course it works… everyone needs backlinks, and this blog has a decent amount of page juice to pass around. That Sphin post is now approaching its target of 300 Sphinns (votes). It accomplished some of the secondary goals as well, which included raising awareness of Sphinn, encouraging more people to actively vote instead of just lurking, and I also encouraged more voting of comments as I see that as an early engagement that leads to more active participation.

But it didn’t (yet?) lead to some of the conversations I had hoped it would prompt. Despite some shallow discussions, nothing significant on the quid pro quo link exchange. And Google continued its attack on “paid links”.

Now Google, as it has to eventually, has started to openly barter direct backlinks from its own properties. Really, folks, it HAS to barter, just as we have to barter. To think otherwise is ridiculous. Now maybe we can point to it as a living example and maybe, just maybe, webmasters will start to wake up and smell the coffee.

The Google blog (which routinely uses the “nofollow” attribute according to Google’s guidelines for link management, has just posted a set of direct backlinks to the people they are calling “bionic posters” in the Google help forums. These back links are not nofollowed. They are genuine, live, link juice passing links. They are presented as a reward for participation… for helping Google’s customers for free, by answering questions in the forums. According to the blog post:

While there are lots of helpful people in our groups, we have some that really stand out as being exceptionally active, helpful, competent and friendly. They volunteer time and energy to help build a great community and to help webmasters all around the world. In order to more publicly recognize their contributions, we’re calling them our Bionic Posters. We want to highlight their outstanding efforts and thank them for the sound advice they’ve offered to so many.

Following that are 12 direct links to the poster’s websites, along with links to their profiles, using their names as anchor text. There is a 13th that did not get a backlink - and it is an SEO who did not identify herself by name or website. I really would have loved to see Google direct link out to a website called SEO101, but I’m not that lucky today.

The take-away is this, folks: Google is controlling you not for some benevolent reason, but in order to control the currency of the web. It took X amount of effort in those forums, dedicated for free by those posters, to earn a direct backlink from Google’s very popular webmaster blog. What was that worth? Google got to decide. Google thinks it is fine to barter in links without the nofollow… it just wants the price for such links to remain pitifully low, managed by Google. Can you see it now? Do we really need to wait a few more years until it is perfectly clear beyond any doubt that Google has all of the money and there is no room for us to share?
A few analogies for those who benefit from analogies:

• SEOs are the card counters of the Internet. Google says gambling is illegal, except in their casino, by their rules, which are rigged in their favor and able to be adjusted at any time, in real time.
• The search optimization community, by investing energy into Google’s arguments, is decimating the public market for SEO, increasing the profits of the underground and so-called Black Hat practitioners and giving Google the room it needs to increase its unofficial, mostly unaccountable monopoly on search traffic.

My how things change in just a few years. Today, AP reporters proudly proclaim their “investigation” of a security loophole on Facebook, describing how they used the hack to peruse materials that clearly were posted to Facebook with an expectation of privacy:

“A security lapse made it possible for unwelcome strangers to peruse personal photos posted on Facebook Inc.’s popular online hangout, circumventing a recent upgrade to the Web site’s privacy controls. The Associated Press verified the loophole Monday after receiving a tip…Using Ng’s template, an AP reporter was able to look up random people on Facebook and see the most recent pictures posted on their personal profiles even if the photos were supposed to be invisible to strangers. The revealed snapshots showed Italian vacations, office gatherings, holiday parties and college students on spring break. The AP also was able to click through a personal photo album that Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg posted in November 2005. — http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ijANq3fmx9AZNNrf7Q1PwCN1cKUAD8VK51UG1“

Just a few years ago, Adrian Lamo was hunted as a fugitive for justice for similar URL playfulness:

“Lamo has become famous for publicly exposing gaping security holes at large corporations, then voluntarily helping the companies fix the vulnerabilities he exploited — sometimes visiting their offices or signing non-disclosure agreements in the process. Until now, his cooperation and transparency have kept him from being prosecuted. Lamo’s hacked Excite@Home, Yahoo, Blogger, and other companies, usually using nothing more than an ordinary Web browser. Some companies have even professed gratitude for his efforts: In December, 2001, Lamo was praised by communications giant WorldCom after he discovered, then helped close, security holes in their intranet that threatened to expose the private networks of Bank of America, CitiCorp, JP Morgan, and others. http://www.securityfocus.com/news/6888“

They ordered Lamo to pay $65,000 for so-called “use” of Lexus Nexus (even though the usage was on an unlimited plan) and 6 months home confinement, plus probation. Truth is, when he hacked the NY Times and exposed their sloppy-at-best online security, he demonstrated how unworthy the Times was of trust, and thus how foolish some very high profile people were for trusting the New York Times:

“…he penetrated the New York Times, after a two-minute scan turned up seven misconfigured proxy servers acting as doorways between the public Internet and the Times private intranet, making the latter accessible to anyone capable of properly configuring their Web browser. Once inside, Lamo exploited weaknesses in the Times password policies to broaden his access, eventually browsing such disparate information as the names and Social Security numbers of the paper’s employees, … a database of 3,000 contributors to the Times op-ed page, containing such information as the social security numbers for former U.N. weapons inspector Richard Butler, Democratic operative James Carville, ex-NSA chief Bobby Inman, Nannygate veteran Zoe Baird, former secretary of state James Baker, Internet policy thinker Larry Lessig, and thespian activist Robert Redford. http://www.securityfocus.com/news/6888“

Today it’s not only OK for the AP reporter to browse around inside, but to write about it as if it were good investigative reporting. We only know what they tell us they looked at… they could probably have looked at anything on Facebook, which I believe, is why legislators made that sort of activity illegal years ago:

“Lamo has been charged in New York under Title 18 U.S.C. 1030 and 1029…The federal laws prohibit unauthorized access to a protected computer, and illegal possession of stolen “access devices” — a term that encompasses passwords, credit card numbers, and the like. — http://www.securityfocus.com/news/6888″

For many years, I have trusted Snopes.com. When my Dad circulates his “Glade air fresheners explode without warning while you sleep” warning emails, I refer him to Snopes where the “Urban Legends” are busted the way MythBusters do it on TV - with cold hard facts and evidence. Snopes has clarified thousands of scammy claims for us, helping to maintain clarifty in a see of deception. Until now? Has “you can trust Snopes.com” become an Urban Legend, too?

So anyway I Google’d “free 411” because I wondered why I didn’t know about this service until now, and surprise! Snopes.com is right up there near the top of the rankings. Huh? Is this a scam? So I clicked through and read a hugely promotional article about Jingle Network’s free411 service. It reads like an informercial!

“Claim: The phone number 1-800-FREE-411 offers free directory assistance service.”

Status: True.

What follows is an advertorial for the free 411 service. Not only that, but the page is titled and has a header of “Free 411″, and includes two direct backlinks to the Jingle networks website, with high quality anchor text and one word proximity to the word “free“. The content itself is so salesy I was offended:

One of the many changes that has taken place in the telephone industry in the last few decades is that while phone companies once generally provided their local customers with free directory assistance (via the 411 phone number), in most cases telephone customers are now charged a fee (typically $1.00 or more) for each directory assistance call. Despite the charges, U.S. consumers continue to avail themselves of the 411 directory assistance service, placing about 6 billion such calls per year.

Now, however, an outfit called Jingle Networks is providing an alternative directory assistance service — and it’s free. Users who call the toll-free number 1-800-FREE411 (or 1-800-373-3411) can navigate a nifty automated voice recognition system that asks for a location (city and state), type of listing (business, government, or residential), and name. Once the service has located an entry for the requested number, it reads the information aloud and offers the caller the option of connecting to the number by pressing a single number on his telephone keypad.

Add to that another 4 paragraphs of glowing endorsement including testimonial:

We made three separate trial calls to 1-800-FREE411 asking for information on different local businesses, and in each case the voice recognition system smoothly processed all our spoken information and correctly identified the businesses of interest. In only one trial out of the three were we presented with an audio advertisement.

The page even has meta keywords typical of snopes.com, except for the first few keywords which appear to be hand crafted for optimization:

< META name=“keywords” content=“free directory assistance, 411, 1-800-FREE-411, 1-800-373-3411…

Go ahead and look at other Snopes pages… they have the same set of keywords, all targeting urban myths and legends and snopes, except for those first 3 obviosuly promotional ones. Is Snopes abusing our trust? There is no “sponsored” notice, and the About Us page says this can’t be:

We are not (and never have been) paid or provided with any other form of remuneration in exchange for writing about a particular topic.

Hey search marketers! If you’re still trying to spam wikipedia I’ve got news for you. Start a rumor that the great thing you are about to introduce to the market is just a rumor, and contact Barbara and David Mikkelson about getting a super cool promotional page on Snopes.com saying Yes! it’s true! Hard to believe, but they ARE bringing you this fabulous product! I can see it now… just two or three days after I publish this post, will there be a Snopes page proclaiming

“Claim: Mahaolo is Better than Google.

Status: True! Mahaloo is human edited spam! Human edited spam is better than machine edited spam!“.

I kid. But to be fair, I did not intend to blog about this, but rather wrote a note to Snopes via their contact form. But when that form submission generated a 404 error, I decided to blog instead. Funny how that works. After all, if Snopes isn’t maintaining the very channel they say is the only way to notify them of problems with their site, I have further reason to suspect foul play.

These days anyone can label themselves an SEO and begin publishing and building an audience. At first, a few basic posts like “make sure you have good title tags” will attract readership and comments like “wow.. this is great advice! Now I’m getting more search traffic than before, thanks!” which help convince others you are an SEOGuru. After a few of those rudimentary posts, if your writing is decent, you may even start to get comments from people who aren’t already close friends. If you choose the MakeMoneyFast route, you can build an audience of thousands without ever actually doing anything meaningful in SEO. Just re-constitute the same old basic advice found everywhere else into a new “how I got rich” scenario, publish a photo of an AdSense check, decline to admit how much you spent on the buy side of your arbitrage enterprise, and gain thousands more subscribers. Everyone wants to make money. Everyone wants something for free. Few want to work hard, and many want to just copy your success. The question to be asked is, at what point is someone calling themselves an SEO actually an SEO? At what point has someone earned authority to publish opinion on issues of SEO? And how do you know, as the reader, to trust that opinion?

In my opinion, it is a simple matter of comparison shopping. Compare unknown person A to known person B, where B has assumed authority, and you can better judge the quality of A. The only problem with this consumer approach to SEO is, we don’t often see two SEOs projecting professional opinions on the same issue. We see plenty of discussions that are in reality non-definitive in any particular market. Much of SEO differs between market niches. That basically guarantees that everyone stating an opinion might be correct in their own niche markets. It is fairly safe to state something is true “in your experience“, especially if you are not required to divulge your specific experience or if it is something that is difficult to test (and, in my experience, most SEO issues are difficult to test).

To complicate things further, the (excessive?) incestuous cross-promotion of SEO personalities in our market leaves us in a situation where when we do see agreement, we don’t really know if we can trust it as true professional agreement. It may be pre-arranged strategic alliance. Are they friends? Are they backing each other up? Are they playing nice, for other reasons?

That’s why I go to the sessions at search conferences. I can listen to “person A” whom I don’t yet trust, paying attention to every actual position they take on an SEO issue. I can then compare them to myself as known Person B, in order to form an opinion of their legitimacy as an actual, practicing SEO. It may sound surprising, but I am able to catch numerous “erroneous statements” made by SEO people at just about every conference. Are they mistakes? Are they errors? People are under pressure when speaking publicly. They make mistakes. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Person A said it, and I have a better understanding of Person A henceforth when I read their blogs or listen to them speak on other topics which I may not know very well. I also get to check on my own confidence, for each issue. If I am not sure about something, I know I have homework to do.

As SEO has specialized, I’ve become a liberal when it comes to defining SEO. An SEO is a person who works in search optimization, deploying techniques and practices that provide a competitive advantage over other web publishers in specific markets. That’s enough to qualify. But an authority is an SEO who can tell other SEOs meaningful things about search optimization that either will work or should work in various markets, based on past and current practical SEO experience. An authority has SEO Wisdom.

The most interesting situation for me is the rare case of SEO disagreeing with SEO, in public, accompanied by intended-to-be-persuading arguments. We never see that at search conferences. I rarely see it even online. But I saw some of it today between a relatively “new” SEO person (Joost deValk) and a relatively “old” SEO person (Mikkel deMib Svendsen), over what boils down to a fundamental philosophy of SEO practice: search engine business behavior.

Enjoy reading the comments for yourself, but it boils down to this: Mikkel has been riding the edge of SEO for many years, and doesn’t trust Google. Joost approaches SEO logically, and doesn’t see why certain SEO techniques that are clearly SEO techniques could be risky, since Google says they are ok. Read it for yourself, because they each try and explain their opinions and it makes for an insightful read if you care to understand the SEO approaches of your potential competitors Joost and Mikkel.

For those who care, I do indeed have an opinion on the debate. And yes, I will share it.

Joost is right, where he looks at the use of nofollow for “site sculpting”, cites Matt Cutts’ own comments on how nofollow can be deployed for such purposes, and notes that you are unlikely to unfairly benefit excessively in the rankings from the strategic use of nofollow in this fashion, and thus risk negative action from Google. But Mikkel is right when he says “from a pure risk perspective its not very smart to take risks you don’t have to when other, less risky and just as effective, strategies are available.”

If you sculpt your site with nofollow, you put yourself on the radar as a competitive webmaster engaging in tactics to influence search rankings. For that reason, and that reason alone, it is ill-advised where that activity gives you a significant advantage over your visible competition. As Mikkel seems to put it, if you took the riskyou must have expected a correspondingly significant gain, and therefore, your intent is clear.

However, if you are in a very competitive market where considered tactics are a necessary but not even sufficient condition for page 1 rankings, then you must by definition deploy tactics which are likely to reveal your intent to influence search rankings. Anytime you assume risk, you must manage that risk. Plausible deniability is a powerful weapon against search engine scrutiny, but the strategic use of nofollow is devoid of plausible deniability. As many have noted, it flies in the face of Google’s own initial purpose for the nofollow attribute. I say, manage your risk, and do what it takes to win.

Several friends have been saying lately that “all the good domain names are taken“. Several domainer friends are sifting through their portfolios right now, dropping lesser names, and looking to list mediocre names for sale to raise revenue for buying premium domains on the aftermarket. I can’t help but think “buy on rumor, sell on news“. Is the increase in domain auctions and aftermarket domaining the “news” part of that? Are the established players getting out now that domaining is a well recognized income opportunity for Everyman? Is it time to sell, not buy?

If that is the case, then the aftermarket for premium domain names is risky. You can’t trust that the market price represents actual value, given the possibility that the hype has exaggerated the appearance of demand, and inflated the pricing. But reg fee domains remain a viable investment. How could they not? At $7 or $8 per domain name per year, how could even a mediocre domain not be worth the investment risk?

But aren’t they all taken? And is it true that “there is no more drop” as I have heard a few times at domainer conferences in the past year?

In my experience, there are still good domains available at reg fee, and the cost of finding them may not be as high as you might think. Maybe I am just a super creative individual, able to imagine possible domains no one else has thought to try? I doubt that. If that were true I wouldn’t be finding worthy previously-registered domains. Someone else once thought they were good.

It is more likely that my vision of what is a “good” domain name is skewed… I think I got a good one, but everyone else thinks it stinks. Therefore, by definition, it has no market value… or does it?

Just as I think my domain has potential, someone else may think so, too. I only need one person who wants my domain in order for me to realize a profit on my investment. Of course I need to find that buyer, but at $8 per year, I have some time. Reg fee domains are a very good investment that way.

Another reason I might be seeing good available domains while others are lamenting how “all the good domains are taken“, is the psychology of belief. If you are told something is true over and over again, in different contexts, you tend to believe it to be true. It is so easy and risk-free to say “I really tried hard and couldn’t find anything“, with no accountability. Are people doing that? Just saying it? For many reasons, we don’t hear too much about those who did find good names.

I can’t list the domains that I buy and think are good, as much as I would like to, because in the context of an SEO blog, domains become targets of aggression by competitors and search engines. A domain owned and operated by an SEO is more suspect than one owned and operated by Everyman, or at least that is my experience. Haters report domains as spam just because they can, and competitors copy everything that can be copied. Domains actively utilized are usually part of a network, and it would be foolish to expose an SEO network just to highlight a good domain purchase.

But I will say I just picked up BackgammonLover.com and BackgammonLovers.com at reg fee, and I had offer for them at a significant markup almost immediately. It took me just a few minutes to discover that those were available and to register them, and just a few more minutes to market them to people involved in backgammon. I haven’t closed a deal yet, because I’m not sure I want to let them go so fast and at the offered price. What do you think? Were these worth $8 each as domain name investments?

Harper Collins’ Press Release describes Tina Wells, CEO of Buzz Marketing, this way:

Tina Wells founded the Buzz Marketing Group, an innovative for-youth-by-youth marketing agency when she was 16. With more than a decade of marketing experience under her belt, and a network of over 9,000 teen consultants (”buzzSpotters(TM)”) worldwide, Tina now joins HarperCollins Publishers to open up a new world of multimedia publishing to tweens using traditional and non-traditional marketing strategies.

Commercial Alert, a pro-consumer and pro-children advocacy group modeled after the success of Ralph Nadar as consumer advocate, describes Tina Well’s new collaboration with Harper Collins this way (emphasis added):

Although touted by the publisher for teaching kids about protecting the environment and promoting global understanding, the Mackenzie Blue series actually aims to be a vehicle for delivering commercial messages, through product-placement hidden advertisements, product tie-ins, and affiliated multi-media corporate sponsorships. The author of the series, Tina Wells, is chief executive of Buzz Marketing Group, which specializes in marketing to children and adolescents. Book publishers should not be exploiting children for commercial gain. Books should educate and entertain children - not encourage them to buy a particular brand of shoe or soft drink.

The press release is here.