They actually guarantee that my site will appear above all other sites on every search engine for my selected keywords.

I knew, of course, that it was some sort of scam, but I was curious about exactly what the scam was. They never actually say it in so many words, but apparently their “service” is a browser-based plug-in that inserts an ad for your site at the very top of the page in your web browser.

They key point that they don’t tell you is that only people with their browser plug-in installed will see your ad. Here’s a screenshot of their home page:

AdWord Express is a scam

The only way AdWord Express could be accomplishing that is with a browser plug-in. Google doesn’t sell ad space like that, and neither do any of the other major search engines.

And here’s a screenshot of their “Browser Upgrade” page:

AdWordExpress is a scam and they will install malicious plug-ins into your browser.

They very cleverly don’t tell you anywhere that their “EXCLUSIVE TOP PLACEMENT” will only appear to people who install these browser plug-ins, but that’s obviously what they’re doing.

And here’s a screenshot of the status bar for installing the “Upgrade for Internet Explorer” and the “Upgrade for Firefox”:

AdWord Express will install plug-ins to your browsers. Probably malicious malware-laden plug-ins. After all, a company that will scam you in one way is likely to scam you in other ways.

See what’s going on there? The IE “upgrade” will run a program called “Upgrade.exe,” and who knows what that will do on your computer….. The Firefox “upgrade” will run “install_tb_XPI(),” which will install something to Firefox —The name suggests a plugin that displays a toolbar, but who really knows?

AdWordExpress is found at adwordexpress.com. They have a private registration through Network Solutions. I swear that the day I received their spam, they were at adwordexpress.net, but that domain now has a GoDaddy parking page. The two domains were registered on 10/4/11 and 10/6/11, just 2 days apart, so they’re probably the same people. It appears that perhaps GoDaddy has already detected their scam and deactivated their site. The .com is still live through Network Solutions, though.

Please…… don’t anyone fall for this scam. And whatever you do, do not install their “browser upgrades.”

I gave him some basic background information on the whole paid links/nofollow debacle. I explained to him that while we don’t know for sure if Google penalizes sites that sell links, they might, and even if they don’t they might start to in the future. His site performs extremely well in all the major search engines, including Google, and I suggested that he wants to be very very careful to avoid doing something that could harm his site’s performance in Google.

I recommended that he tell the link broker that he would be happy to sell the links but that they would be nofollowed — predicting, also, that the link broker would decline such links. He did, and they did.

It still irks me that after introducing the nofollow tag under the guise of reducing blog link spam, Google then expanded its recommended usage and then further expanded that to become essentially a “requirement” that paid links be nofollowed. With Google’s focus on inbound links for ranking pages, Google almost singlehandedly created the voluminous quantities of link spam that infests the web. Now they require that webmasters and website owners help them clean up the mess.

My client is smart and savvy, and has spent years building a very high-quality site that has garnered thousands of links from major universities, public school systems, Discovery, PBS, the History Channel, Fox, and many many other large, authoritative sources. But he doesn’t live, eat and breathe SEO, and he didn’t know about paid links or the nofollow tag. He was interested in the offer he received because his AdSense income has dropped this year, and he’s looking for other sources of revenue. I’m not typically the type to cry “It’s not fair,” because I know that life is simply not fair — but in this case I’ll make an exception. It’s not fair for Google to threaten dire consequences to his site simply because he didn’t know that an offer he received would violate Google’s policy on paid links. This man focuses on building a quality site; he doesn’t spend his time practicing black-hat SEO or poring over Google’s webmaster guidelines.

The only thing is, since we live in south Florida, it’s really not cool enough yet for a fire. We had to open all the windows and turn on the ceiling fan to get the living room cool enough to have a fire.

Years ago, there was a tourism campaign — I think it was sponsored by the Florida Tourism Bureau or some-such quasi-governmental agency. The tagline was “Florida: The Rules Are Different Here.”

That campaign was pretty lame, and it was widely ridiculed and lampooned. This was during the 1980s drug-running heyday, and the “Rules” tourism campaign came to be associated with that. But the message about different rules could be applied to website development. “The Web: The Rules Are Different Here.”

I frequently see sites — and am sometimes asked by new clients for re-designs of sites — that were obviously designed/developed/coded by someone with a background in print design who hasn’t yet learned that the rules are different here.

They use huge graphics that take forever to load. They use rigid, inflexible designs that fall apart when you resize the text in your browser, or when you have a browser window that’s larger or smaller than the window the designer tested in when developing the site. They use drag-and-drop WYSINWYG (What You See Is NOT What You Get) software programs that write code that’s invalid, that displays improperly in some browsers, and that often makes use of javascript or Flash buttons for links — making those all-important links invisible to the search engines.

They don’t understand that the web is not a fixed canvas, like paper. They don’t understand that some of the most important types of visitors are search engines, which are essentially deaf and blind users with browsers that have neither Flash nor Javascript.

Many — probably most — print designers are perfectly capable of learning the “rules of the web” and how it’s different from print work. But all too many of them don’t.

I checked the DNS settings on the server. I did traceroutes from my computer. I went to websites in other parts of the country and did traceroutes. I pinged. I double-checked and triple-checked the nameservers. Everything was exactly right, and I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out why the client couldn’t reach his own site.

Finally, it struck me: The client was searching for the site, using the search box on Yahoo and Comcast.

Once I told him that his site not indexed yet (because it’s brand new), and that he needed to enter the URL directly into the browser’s address bar — voila! Problem solved.

This is one to file away to deal with future “can’t reach my site” issues.

Note to website designers and developers: If you ever have clients who can’t reach their site, check to see if they’re searching for it.

“I was looking at websites under the keyword face lift cape coral and came across your site tropicalwebworks.com. I see that you’re ranked #1 on page 18 in google.

I am not sure if you are aware of why you’re ranked this low but more importantly how easily correctable this is.”

My site, tropicalwebworks.com, promotes my website development firm, and it’s located in Punta Gorda. I have nothing to do with face lifts. I don’t have a single client who wants to rank for face lifts. And I don’t particularly target Cape Coral.

Furthermore, there is only one result (count ‘em, one) in google for the search allintitle:face lift cape coral. That means that the competition for that term is virtually zero, and I could easily rank for face lift cape coral if I wanted to. Which I don’t.

I really don’t understand the point of sending spam offering to help people rank for search terms that they have no interest in.

And of course, the main take-home point is that reputable search engine optimization firms don’t send you e-mails out of the blue offering to help you rank for worthless keyphrases. If you receive such an e-mail (or phone call), that’s a sign that you should run away.

(Update: Within a couple of hours of posting this entry on my blog, my site was ranking #1 for face lift cape coral in Google! Take that, you spammers!)

I’ve been seeing great commissions since switching my eBay affiliate links to ePN (eBay Partner Network), but unfortunately eBay’s reporting isn’t much better than Commission Junction’s. If you want to see what item sold on eBay for any particular transaction, you still have to download the report, open it, scroll over to the column with the item numbers, copy the item number, go to ebay.com, paste the item number in the search field, and hit “Go.”

What a PITA! I’m pretty good with php, so I decided to roll my own script. I started out with just the basic info that eBay provides in the downloadable report, and wrote a script that outputs the report contents with the item id as a clickable link so that I could go directly to that item on eBay.

Then I added code to use eBay’s developer API to pull in the item name, thumbnail image, number of bids, buyer name, seller name, and category name.

Now I have a really cool script that shows me exactly what items sold in eBay, their prices, pictures, and extra info.

I’m such a nice person, I decided to give this script away to any eBay affiliate who wants to use it. I’m not forcing you to upload your transaction report to my server; oh no…. I’m offering the script as a free download that you can download, put on your own server, and run from within your own hosting account.

I’m doing this because I’m such a nice person. And because I think it just might get me a few nice backlinks.

• You can get the script here:
  TWW’s eBay Report Tracker

Check out a screenshot: (click to enlarge)

But it’s also surprisingly satisfying to spend a few hours optimizing a small site for a new client, and then to see, almost immediately, improvements in that site’s performance in the search engines.

I recently spent less than a half day working a small site (about 5 pages) for a client. I didn’t build the site; it already existed when the client came to me, looking for help to get better search engine placement.

I did minor, basic, SEO 101 type things: I wrote custom title tags and description meta tags for each page. I added appropriate alt text to all the images. I cleaned up the html a little, to use proper h1 and h2 headings. None of this was rocket science, nor even high-level SEO.

Almost right away, the site started performing better in the search engines. From last September through March 10, the site had been found for a grand total of 7 different search phrases, most of which were some variation of the company’s name. I worked my “SEO magic” on March. 10. From March 11 to today, March 28, the site has been found for 46 different search phrases, many of which are excellent keyphrases for this company, and traffic has increased tenfold.

This site has only 6 pages, virtually no backlinks, and no marketing or advertising budget to speak of. The company’s service is a very small, narrow, geographically limited niche which will never draw hundreds or thousands of visitors per month. But within days of the small changes I made to the site, the site was drawing targeted organic search traffic at levels previously undreamed of.

I’m currently participating in a discussion on the SitePoint forums in which the topic of discussion is a web site developer who offers “SEO friendly CMS” (content management system) — but this developer builds his clients’ sites in frames. Not only does he use frames, but the framed content is actually hosted on his domain, not his clients.

There are many, many reasons this is a terrible idea. I won’t go into those here.

What I want to talk about is the statement by one forum member who wrote, “When the pages are indexed, yes they’ll show his domain but unless the client has specifically asked for that not to happen it’s not unethical.”

That’s completely wrongheaded thinking, in my opinion. Clients should not have to know enough about the website building process, the architecture of html pages and framesets, and the inner workings of search engines to request that the developer avoid certain practices that would be bad for the client’s site.

The client hires the web developer because the web developer allegedly has expertise in this area. Any monkey can peck at keys on a keyboard; it’s not the web developer’s time-on-keyboard the client is in need of. It’s the web developer’s expertise.

When I hire professionals or specialists to perform a service for me, I rely on their expertise. I don’t think I should have to study up so that I can tell my mechanic how much torque to use when tightening the tires on my car, or tell my plumber what not to do in order to avoid damaging my plumbing system, or tell my doctor which medicines are contraindicated, or provide my lawyer with the exact wording necessary for a business contract. I hire those people because they supposedly know what they’re doing. They’re supposed to know how to do the things they’re hired to do, and they’re supposed to know what techniques and processes to avoid due to potential damage.

In a similar vein, I believe that anyone who holds him or herself out as a professional website developer — and particularly one who claims “SEO friendly” anything — has a responsibility to perform the promised service using industry-accepted “best practices” without regard to whether the client has sufficient knowledge to request those best practices specifically.

I believe, in fact, that it is unethical for a website developer to engage in the types of practices discussed in the SitePoint forum thread, and in many other practices as well.

But unfortunately, from the client’s point of view, I don’t have a solution to offer. The client, who is usually not an expert in these things, doesn’t even know the right questions to ask, much less have any way of evaluating the answers. It’s all too easy for the unethical developers to give impressive-sounding, baffle-’em-with-bullshit, high-falutin’ answers. It’s easy to talk the talk; but how does the client assess whether the developer walks the walk?

A lot of the things the client should be assessing aren’t obvious from looking at the developer’s portfolio, unless the client himself becomes an expert on web technology. It’s not rocket science, but in my experience, most clients just don’t have the time or the inclination to do that. They’re too busy running their businesses.

Read my explanation here.

The result is the Orangutan Island Forum. Almost immediately, the site jumped to 3rd place in Google for a search on Orangutan Island — just behind the official Animal Planet pages. I was pleasantly surprised when people started registering on the forum and talking about the show, and I’m having fun participating in the discussions and learning the ins and outs of the phpBB software.

But I wasn’t sure about my choice of forum software. I didn’t want to pay for the well-loved and very robust vBulletin — after all, this whole thing was just a whim, and my budget was non-existent. I knew that phpBB is a well-known and popular open source forum package, but development is in flux just now: They’re working on getting phpBB 3 into final release, and I dithered about whether I should install the “stable” version 2 or the “unstable” RC (release candidate) version 3. I went with version 2 and I’ve been second-guessing my choice every day.

Then I got to looking more deeply into forum packages, and I discovered the Simple Machines Forum — not open source in the conventional sense, but free to use, so long as you keep the copyright in place and follow a few other minimal restrictions. From everything I read about it, SMF sounded robust and full featured, and I wanted to try it out.

I started casting about for another forum idea, looking for some reason to set up another forum somewhere so that I could give SMF a whirl, and I had a brainstorm: I use a software program called Studiometry for my client and project management and invoicing. The company that makes Studiometry used to have a very useful user forum, but they shut it down sometime back with no explanation.

So I registered studiometryforum.com and set up the Studiometry Forum.

The SMF software was reasonably easy to install, although it was more difficult than I had hoped to find a theme that suited me. But everything worked as advertised out of the box (which isn’t always the case), and the theme I finally settled on was easy to install. I wanted to make a few minor changes to the html/css of that skin, and that was also easy.

I have only a handful of users so far on this new forum, but I’m hopeful it will gain traction and attract the Studiometry users who used to frequent the official Studiometry forums.

And even if it doesn’t, I gained valuable experience learning my way around a fine forum software package. It’s always beneficial to know what’s available and how easy or difficult it is to install and customize.

A provider of real estate web sites wrote:

“We do not use a system that allows you to make your own major content and format changes through your web browser (except you can add, edit, and delete your own listings and links) because that type of system requires a setup that does not allow search engines to index those pages.”

Malarkey! It is entirely possible to provide a system that permits the site owner to edit their site without erecting a barrier to search engine crawlability. The above statement really means that the site provider who wrote those words doesn’t know how to develop such a system.

A so-called “expert” for a major real estate portal wrote:

“Your site will never place well in search engines for competitive keywords (those actually used by searchers) if you are using a provider whose system allows you to make your own changes to your site through a web based administration area.

This is because the areas that you can access – search engines can’t.”

At the risk of repeating myself: Malarkey! Any website developer who knows a little bit about how search engines work, and a little bit about back-end server-side programming, should be perfectly capable of developing such a system. The search engines don’t need to access the admin area that the site owner uses to edit the site; the search engines only need to be able to access the public-facing pages. It takes the right knowledge and expertise to set the site up properly to make it easily crawlable by the search engines, but it’s not only possible, it’s common. Tropical Web Works has developed such sites for many clients.

This same “expert” wrote:

“All web site providers will tell you that their sites are designed to place well in search engines. What do they mean?

What they are saying is that their web sites have Meta Tags (see #4 above).”

My, what a sweeping statement in which this self-anointed expert claims to know exactly what “all web site providers” mean by something. Granted, meta tags (particularly the keyword meta tag) are nearly worthless — and if a web site provider claims that his sites will do well in search engines because it has meta tags, you should run, not walk, away as fast as you can. But it is definitely not the case that “all web site providers” make that claim. (Straw-man arguments are so easy to knock down.)

Another major web site provider wrote:

“To place well for a long list of keywords requires the production of many doorway pages.”

Malarkey! (There seems to be an echo developing in here.) Placing well for a long list of keywords is the natural result of developing a web site with many pages of on-topic quality content. No doorway pages are needed (nor are they beneficial). Write lots of good content for your site, make sure the site is structured logically and is crawlable by the search engines, and get some inbound links to some of those pages of content, and your site is very likely to rank well for a long list of keywords.

There is lots more bad information out there. Let me know when you run across these kinds of things, and we’ll address them here.

Okay, enough of that. Today I’m going to talk about crawlability and web design. I got to browsing the Unique ID blog and read Zack’s post “Straight From Google, The Four Biggest Search Rank Factors,” in which “crawlability” is listed as the very top, highest priority, most important search engine ranking ractor for a web site. This week I’ve also been following a discussion at the High Rankings forums about whether web designers have any SEO responsibility when designing a web site.

The discussion at High Rankings opened with the story of a businessman who hired someone to design a web site for his business. The site was built in Flash, and, as might be expected, the businessman’s web site didn’t do so very well in the search engines. When he sought professional SEO help, he was flabbergasted to learn that an all-Flash site is likely to rank poorly, if at all, in the search engines.

He asked the SEO pro, “Why did the designer use Flash when he knew I wanted search engine visibility?”

A better question would be, why do designers design “search-engine hostile” web sites when they know clients want search engine visibility?

As things stand in the world of web design, anyone with some elementary graphic design skills can get themselves a copy of Dreamweaver or FrontPage and hang out their “Web Designer” shingle, offering their services for a fee to all comers.

Some of these designers do indeed have a lot of artistic talent with respect to creating pretty, aesthetically pleasing, visually attractive web sites.

What these designers lack is a fundamental understanding of the underlying code and structure of web pages, and a fundamental understanding of how search engines crawl and index web pages, and a fundamental understanding of how a web site needs to be structured in order to have a chance of getting search engine traffic.

So these web designers make a “pretty design” in Photoshop or Fireworks or Flash, and use the built-in export features from those programs to auto-generate the code or the Flash file. The client ends up with a very pretty site that hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of doing well in organic searches.

The web is still relatively new as a commercial medium, and there is still some level of technical knowledge required in order to build a crawlable web site. Daily we see self-labeled “professional” web designers creating all-Flash sites, or using fancy javascript-based rollover images for global navigation, or relying on other artsy-fartsy features that doom a site to search engine purgatory — a site that is uncrawlable by search engine spiders, and generally invisible in the search engines.

The client doesn’t understand why his beautiful site gets little or no search engine traffic. The client eventually discovers, if he’s lucky or persistent, that he now has to pay for his site all over again, this time to have someone else tear apart his beautiful artsy-fartsy site and re-build it using underlying code and techniques that the search engines can crawl.

Does it have to be this way?

Should it be this way?

I say no, it shouldn’t. Some people might argue that a web designer’s responsibility is to design pretty stuff, not to perform search engine optimization. That’s true up to a point — I wouldn’t posit that it’s the web designer’s responsibility to do link building or write linkbait articles or do keyword research, unless those activities are explicitly included in the agreement.

But I do argue that anyone who holds himself out as a “professional web designer” should have a broad and fundamental understanding of the technology of the medium and the factors that are required for success in that medium. I do argue that the “professional web designer” is holding himself out as an expert, and the client is relying on the expert’s knowledge and experience.

The client shouldn’t have to have a specialist’s knowledge of the medium — that’s why the client hires a professional. When I hire a contractor to build a house, I shouldn’t have to become an expert on building houses, and I shouldn’t have to give the contractor explicit detailed instructions about how to run the wiring so it doesn’t burn the house down. I expect the contractor — ”the professional” — to have the knowledge and expertise to do that himself, even if the contract doesn’t explicitly state that the contractor will run the wiring so that it doesn’t burn the house down.

In an ideal world, building contractors would always run the wiring so that it doesn’t burn the house down, and in that same ideal world, web designers would always build crawlable web sites.

The only exception I would make to this general rule is when a client specifically requests features that will cause crawlability problems, and, after being educated by the web designer about the consequences of his request, the client insists that his aesthetic vision is more important than search engine visibility. The client is paying for the site, after all. But even then there are usually steps the web designer can take to mitigate and overcome the problems — including text links in the footer to complement the pretty Flash buttons at the top of the page, for example.

Meanwhile, we live in an imperfect “buyer beware” world where the web designers who understand the medium are competing against the web designers who don’t. Clients have to educate themselves sufficiently, and ask lots of questions of potential designers, in order to be sure they end up with a crawlable web site.

I have only the most minor, off-hand reference in the site. There’s a quotation from Hank Hill in my quotation database, which is a simple example that I put on my database programming page to give a little demo of what can be done with databases, for clients who aren’t familiar with their use.

So I thought to myself, “Self, if you can rank at #66 and #32 respectively in Google and Yahoo for that search term without even trying, could you do better if you actually tried?” And so I logged into my GoDaddy account and registered hankhillquotes.com. Then I set up a simple site with a basic database, which I populated with a few quotes from each of the major characters.

I plan on spending a few minutes a day adding quotations to the database, and over time expanding the site somewhat too — perhaps adding character bios, episode descriptions, things like that.

I’ll post my progress here and let you know what shakes out. Hopefully, there won’t be some mean-spirited person who comes along and puts major effort into outranking me. This is just a small effort on my part to see what happens.

Pam is not navigating directly to the web site she wants. She is searching for that web site, even though she knows the exact domain. She searches, and the site appears at the top of the search results, and she clicks the link to go to the site. This happens all the time. I see the results in the logfiles, too — the logfiles show me when someone has conducted a search for a domain and then clicked the domain in the search results to get there. Every time I see it, I shake my head in amazement.

This behavior is probably a symptom of “satisficing,” a term coined to refer to something that may not be ideal, but works sufficiently well for a person that they’re not willing to learn a better way. People are used to using that ubiquitous Google Toolbar for everything, or they perceive “the Internet” as being whatever they can get to through their Yahoo homepage. They are simply not aware of any other method of navigation.

Regardless of why this behavior occurs, it means that web site owners, who go to a lot of time and effort to promote their web sites, need to make darn sure that their site comes up at the #1 spot in a search for their domain.

I just signed on a new client this week, to do a complete redevelopment of an existing web site. The current site is so badly constructed that it does not come up #1 in Google in a search for the domain. It doesn’t even turn up in the first 5 pages of Google in a search for the domain. The site is #1 in MSN and Yahoo — but not in the first 5 pages of Google! This is a site that’s been around for several years — there’s no aging delay or sandbox effect at work here. There aren’t many guarantees in the world of search engines, but I will have this site turning up at #1 in Google in a search for the domain before long.

Another site I’m currently developing, a brand-new site, brand-new domain, registered for the first time 2 months ago and not yet fully indexed in any of the big 3 search engines, turns up #1 in all 3 search engines in a search for the domain. That is as it should be. There is no excuse for anything else.

But sometimes that’s simply not possible. Particularly when the potential client is looking for improved search engine performance or better usability.

Sometimes a site can be improved dramatically by minor tweaks: Add unique, custom title tags to each page, add alt text to images where needed, add text-based site navigation, beef up the content, and a few other improvements. Bang, I’m done, and the client can look for improved performance whenever the search engines see fit to recognize the changes to the site. (That might take days, it might be weeks, it might be months — I try to make sure the client is aware that I have no control over what the search engines do in that regard.)

But all too often the site is constructed so badly that nothing but a total redeveloment will do:

• Frames — frames-based sites are not only less usable for human visitors, but they still throw roadblocks in the path of the search engines trying to index the site.
• Frames Part Two — Even worse is sites that frame content from other sites. The framing site gets no credit in the SEs for the framed off-site content.
• All-Flash Sites — The search engines are working on their ability to index Flash sites, but your all-Flash site is unlikely to be the breakthrough. Flash elements should be used sparingly to add to the visitor’s experience, but Flash should not be the site.
• Search-engine-hostile Dynamic URLs– There are so many ways to go wrong here that it’s hard to list them all. Session IDs in URLs. Meaningless long numbers and section ids and category ids. URLs that display all the site’s content on the same page (using formats like “index.php?page=thispage”).It’s so easy to use the magic of server-side technology to write user-friendly and search-engine-friendly URLs, and to keep session IDs out of URLs. Which type of URL do you like better:
  • http://www.example.com/products/red-widgets.html, OR
  • http://www.example.com/index.php?cat=52 &section=355&prodid=125
&_trksid=p0.m570.l1313&hash=2394087lasmn8&sess_id=5348725987ofdj30487590fjglkae098t87q34085uofilajg

  Yeah, I thought so. Me too. The search engines like the first one better too.

• Lack of content — if there’s little or nothing for the search engines to spider, there’s little or no likelihood of any of the pages turning up in searches.
• Sites that requires the user to submit a form before seeing the content — Hey, search engine spiders don’t submit forms; they’ll never see all that great content on your site.
• Invalid tag soup — Badly coded sites with such badly formed html that it’s darn near impossible to work with the code. When I’m optimizing a site, I need to get down-and-dirty in the code, and pages with invalidly nested tables, invalidly nested divs, incomprehensible, invalid code everywhere — well, I just can’t work with it. It’s hard to even touch the code in a site like that, because you just don’t know what will happen.
• Rigid, inflexible design and code — This usually results from so-called “designers” who design a pretty image in Photoshop or Fireworks and then slice it up and export the entire thing from their image-editing program. The code for these sites is so rigid that you can’t make a single change without breaking the entire thing.
• Template sites based on some badly designed content management system — There are too many big companies out there who have built half-baked content management systems that allow anyone to “build their web site” with a few clicks of their mouse. Nice concept, but usually badly implemented. These sites are usually required to be hosted with the “big company” and runs off their database on their servers. These template sites often don’t allow custom title tags or custom descriptions for each page. They also don’t allow any access to the underlying code. This means I can’t make search-engine friendly URLs, and I can’t set up a 301 redirect, and I can’t eliminate the appearance of duplicate content, and I can’t do any of the easy tweaks that are needed.

All too often, I see sites that suffer from most or all of the above problems. I may be able to work around one or two of the above items, but when a site presents numerous serious technical problems, there’s just no point in attempting to patch the old wineskin.

It’s a shame when someone has paid good money for a site that is so badly constructed that it can’t be improved. But there are times that it makes more sense to throw out the old and build anew.

URL (pronounced you-are-ell, or sometimes “earl” as in Duke of) stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It’s the technical name for the address of a particular web page. For example, the URL of this site’s home page is http://www.tropicalwebworks.org, and the URL of this page is http://www.tropicalwebworks.org/2007/01/18/infamous-canonical-url/.

It’s common that any particular web page may be reached at multiple URLs. If this site were not configured optimally, the home page might be reachable at both http://www.tropicalwebworks.org and http://tropicalwebworks.org (notice the missing “www.”). Normal people would logically think that this would be desirable: After all, you don’t want people to get a “server not found” error if they try to get to your site without including the www part.

But Google sees these as two completely separate URLs that just happen to contain exactly the same content. There are two problems with such a situation:

1. First, the “strength” of that page, and its ability to turn up in the search engine results, is diluted. Some of the page’s strength is allotted to one version, and some to the other, and neither “page” performs as well as it would if all the strength were concentrated in one page.
2. And second, Google attempts to filter out pages containing duplicate content, based on the reasonable logic that people don’t want to see multiple results in their searches for the exact same thing. Thus, since both of these “pages” contain the exact same content, one of them will suffer in searches due to the dupe content filter.

It’s a double whammy. It’s not that your site actually has duplicate content. No, we could possibly call this situation “virtual duplicate content.” But it’s all the same to Google: It’s duplicate content, period.

And if that’s not bad enough, many people link to their home page like this: http://www.example.com/index.html. Now Google sees yet another instance of duplicate content: http://www.example.com and http://www.example.com/index.html. So ultimately what Google sees is four “duplicate content” pages:

• http://www.example.com
• http://example.com
• http://www.example.com/index.html
• http://example.com/index.html

And all this before we’ve even gotten past the home page of your site!

It’s easy-peasy to configure the server to do what’s called a “301 permanent redirect” from the non-www version to the www version of your site. This technique, which is recommended by Google, tells Google that the two are indeed the same and keeps the poor Googlebot from deciding that you have duplicate content and splitting your page’s strength among more than one version. “301″ refers to the status code that’s returned by the web server to the browser (or the spider, in this case), and it says, in effect, “Hey, the correct, permanent URL for the page you’re requesting is actually over there. Don’t index it at this URL.”

It’s likewise easy-peasy to link to your home page without the “index.html” (or other directory index name, such as home.htm or default.asp). For index pages in subdirectories, you simply link to the directory: http://www.example.com/subdirectory/, again leaving out the actual filename index.html.

I apply an appropriate 301 permanent redirect to the www version of every web site I develop. It’s not something I charge extra for, or something that I tout to my clients as being anything special. It’s about a 20-second task to set up the 301 properly. And I never link to directory index pages by filename. I don’t know why some of the big companies aren’t aware of this issue, or, if they are aware, why they don’t care enough to do it properly. It raises the question, if they’re so ignorant, or uncaring, about a thing that is so simple to do right, in how many other areas are they incompetent?

The bonus? Most of these recommendations also help your site comply with W3C HTML/XHTML standards, as well as improve accessibility for the disabled.

First, a word of explanation for readers scratching their heads right now and wondering what the heck a sandbox has to do with Google: Since the spring of 2004, webmasters have been noticing that many new sites may take anywhere from 3 months to a year to rank highly in Google for their preferred keyword searches. No matter how well optimized the site, no matter how relevant the content, no matter how many inbound links. The site will rank in the top 10 in MSN and Yahoo, but is nowhere to be found in Google for the same searches. Then, suddenly, as if a dam has broken, the site starts ranking in Google.

This has become known as the sandbox. Or the sandbox effect. Or the “aging delay” or “aging filter.”

What is it? Where did it come from? Why does it exist?

In late 2005, after many months of speculation by webmasters, Matt Cutts said, in response to a question from Brett Tabke of WebmasterWorld, that there isn’t a sandbox, but that “the algorithm might affect some sites, under some circumstances, in a way that a webmaster would perceive as being sandboxed.”

Later, he amplified on that response to state that the sandbox effect wasn’t implemented intentionally, but that the engineers at Google, when they investigated the complaints, liked what it was doing. In other words, the sandbox is a side effect of one or more other factors in Google’s algorithm, probably those having to do with age of domain, age of inbound links, and other time-related factors.

I don’t care to argue about whether it’s called a sandbox or an effect, a filter or a penalty. I only care that sites, good sites with good content, often simply cannot rank well in Google for a period of months, no matter what they do. For the sake of simplicity, I’m content to call it a sandbox, but you can call it Aunt Dora if you like.

The sandbox apparently does not affect all sites. Word on the SEO street is that it affects sites attempting to rank for competitive or spammy keywords, or sites in competitive or spammy industries. Hey, I’m all for sandboxing the spam. Can we box it all up and send it to Antarctica on a permanent holiday? We don’t even want it back.

But does Google really have to ‘box the good sites along with the bad? Aren’t there enough geniuses working at the ‘plex to enable them to box the spammy junk sites but let the good ones bubble up?

Fortunately, the good folks at WordPress popped out an update right quick to fix the vulnerability. I installed the update here yesterday, as well as on the WordPress-based sites belonging to clients, and none of us was hurt. A lot of the really big names in SEO were hit, though, because the hacker went after them first. Us little fishies had warnings so that we could update in time.

Okay, now look at that timeline. On the 15th, the hacking started. On the 16th, I applied the patch to WordPress sites. One of the really terrific things about open source software is that it gets maintained by people who care passionately about it. The WordPress programmers have pride in their work, and they weren’t about to leave WordPress open to this sort of maliciousness a minute longer than they had to.

So why does Microsoft often take months to push out security patches?

Linkbait is the buzzword. Linkbaiting is the practice of placing something on your web site that is intended specifically to cause other sites to link to you. It’s baiting your hook with something so irresistable that it’s bound to get people’s attention and cause them to link to your site.

Linkbait can come in many forms:

Controversy: You can write an article for your site that takes a controversial stance on some topic that is of concern to many people. The thinking here is that other people will post something on their own sites disagreeing with you, and in so doing will include a link to your site. There’s nothing wrong with the spirit of debate — but be prepared to take some flak from all the people doing the disagreeing.

Humor: A cartoon, a Flash video, an essay. Self-deprecating humor. Poking fun at your own field of business. Humor is exceptionally difficult to do well — but great humor travels fast on the internet.

News: Be the first on the web to report something important. (Drudge comes to mind here.)

Do something newsworthy: Get arrested on trumped-up indecency charges. Run for office on some nutty platform. Get sued by somebody important. Sue somebody important.

Be an informational resource: Provide valuable information on a topic of importance that people can find no where else.

Reveal secrets: Post your tax return. Post the tax return of your boss. Reveal Google’s secret algorithm. Post the formula for Coca-Cola. Prepare to be sued — more linkbait!

Linkbaiting can be done at a local level, regionally, or nationally. You might have more success taking a controversial stance on that rezoning issue that’s a hot topic in your town, than trying to be the next Matt Drudge.

The above list is only a sampling of the types of linkbaiting that are possible. Use your imagination, and be aware of what people are thinking about and talking about. The gossip around the water cooler could give you your next great linkbait idea.