Sugarrae aka Rae Hoffman

Good Financial Advice for Startups: AKA Calacanis is Right

I stumbled across a Techcrunch post about how startups need to manage money and hiring processes or risk failing that came as a result of a post by Jason Calacanis about how startups can save money that was then sensationalized and heavily criticized.

The debate reminded me of the thoughts on handling employees at a startup (and the extremely differing opinions on the topic) that were shared a while back by Rand, Andy and myself. Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis seem to agree with Andy and myself that “jobbers” are cancer to a startup and need to be ousted as soon as you figure out you’ve made the mistake of hiring one. Rand seems to be more with Duncan and Stilgherrian.

Michael made one potent and all important statement in his article:

You cannot waste money because every dollar is an amount of time you can keep running the business before you have to shut down. Run out of dollars before you reach profitability or convince investors to double down, and you’re done.

The only thing I might add is that you cannot waste money *on consumer goods or on employees* and that if you find you’re doing either, you must stop - stop spending or start firing those who aren’t giving you the best bang for your buck possible. Harsh? Maybe. Necessary? You bet your ass.

That said, Calacanis had some smart suggestions (though I wasn’t in like with them all) on saving money…

Buy second monitors for everyone…

I couldn’t agree more and every employee in my office has a double monitor setup. If there is one thing we can’t afford to be cheap with as an Internet startup, it’s our computer and monitors. The money spent on the front end is recouped many times over in the long run.

…establish a no-meetings policy…

While I’m not buying my employees lunch four days a week (though I do once in a while) I do believe heavily in the no meetings policy. I worked for a corporation at one point in my life that was obsessed with them and would drag every single employee in the company into a meeting for hours every Friday… the “higher level” employees like myself got to go to even more. They were always a waste of time, boring to employees and took time away from being able to do real work.

Buy cheap tables and expensive chairs…

That pretty much describes our office setup for all the workstations (our chairs aren’t Areon, but they weren’t cheap either) - even mine… though we did recently splurge on a bookcase and a set of drawers (and I hated every second of spending that cash).

Don’t buy a phone system. No one will use it.

I bought a cordless phone system (next to the printer) with two handsets that are as mobile as they need to be and that is what we use in the office. We’re not on the phone a lot and a regular phone works just fine for our needs.

Rent out your extra space…

Done. We sublet some of our office space out to one other small company and we’re like this weird little hybrid family now. We save on our own costs and get some great minds (and users with social media accounts) at the same time.

Allow folks to work off hours…

All of our employees have a choice on their hours (within reason)… some come in as early as seven a.m. and others as late as 10 a.m. - and we aren’t in a “commuter heavy city”… I simply give the option so they can have some flexibility on when to start their work day and work during the time they feel most productive.

Outsource to middle America…

Some of our best “employees” are full time contractors who work from home within “middle America”. With Basecamp (ironic ain’t it), IM, webcams, email, multiple means of BlackBerry communication, etc. being remote definitely doesn’t mean being isolated from the team.

Several other things Jason suggested - outsourcing accounting and HR, utilizing Google docs instead of Microsoft Office (unless you’re the type of company to use bootleg copies, which we of course, most certainly are not) and keeping the fridge stocked full of sodas are also things I’m also doing with my company.

Pat Phelan made some additional suggestions which included not flying first class (I would never use company money to upgrade, but would use personal money or points) and having events and conferences justified before spending the cash to attend them (SEO conferences are on my own dime because they largely are about giving back and seeing friends now… company money only goes to conferences where we think we can get the ROI on attending). Pat also mentioned keeping your company offices away from large metro areas, which we’ve also done.

Robert Scoble also chimed in saying he thought Calacanis was right on his tough stance on hiring/firing, though I can’t say I agree with firing the smokers but maybe the fact that my smokers are working late, from home and doing whatever it takes to get their tasks done on deadline and better than required has softened me there. But I did agree with his suggestion of doubling up on hotel rooms… our guys are doing so at the end of the month for a conference.

As my own added money saving tip…

- We trade if and when we can. We have valuable skills and we’re not adverse to trading them with people who have other valuable skills when the opportunity arises *and* is a win-win situation for both companies involved.

On the subject of “firing those who have a life”, I think Jason said it very well in his subsequent post…

Some people work in order to live (like I did in IT), while others live to work (like I’ve done most of my adult life).

I won’t hesitate (and haven’t hesitated in the past) to get rid of an employee who is just showing up to collect a check. I find it amusing that people automatically assume that if you cut the slackers and keep only the achievers, then the employees you do keep must be miserable. From Stilgherrian’s post…

Can you imagine what it’d be like working for this guy? Do you think you’d get much loyalty in return for being a wage-slave?

Guess what - being expected to be a stellar performer does not automatically make someone miserable or make the person with the expectations an asshole. Our employees, according to their feedback to me, are glad to be in an environment where they are valued, they’re able to learn a hell of a lot from the fast pace and feel that they are part of a fantastic team of talent, drive and meaning.

If you think expecting hard work brings resentment, try talking to your best performers who stay late, work hard and always over perform and ask how they feel about being paid the same and treated the same as employees in equal positions who start packing up to go home at 4:50 in the afternoon - *that* breeds resentment folks. Along with feelings of under appreciation.

In my opinion, being kept on a team with high standards that *also* recognizes and rewards those efforts breeds satisfaction.

This post came from the Sugarrae Internet Marketing Blog maintained by Rae Hoffman.

Not at the SMX? Want to be? I can help…

Its that kid again, Michael Streko - the one who was unable to write a post because of some crappy car accident, remember it could have been awesome? Well guess what - its going to be awesome. While Rae is out ~~drinking~~ speaking at the SMX I have invaded her blog for the guestwhore post that should have been…

So I am not at the SMX - yeah it sucks.

If you are like me and find yourself sitting home or at your job but you would rather be rubbing elbows with all the cool seo kids, eating a great network lunch, live blogging or collecting all kinds of neat schwag, have no fear, I can make your fantasy a reality…

How to live blog when you are not at the conference - This requires 2 Computers - 1 Can be a desktop but the other MUST be a laptop for the full effect. Get a chair - and sit it in front of you Desktop computer. Then put on a shirt that says “I Am Blogging This”, find a persons blog who has been live blogging the event & cut and paste it into this software which will speak the text out loud for you. Now with your laptop sit and live blog everything the software reads to you. Sit close to your speakers & turn the volume up to get the real effect.
How to Mingle with the SEO Rockstars at the after party - Now this requires some beer or other alcoholic drink that you might enjoy, your laptop & a twitter account. First log onto twitter and start to find all the Speakers, Moderators & Keynotes - add them to your twitter account. Begin to drink & randomly send them twitters - if you are lucky they will respond maybe 1 or 2 times. The drunker you get the more entertaining this can be - for the full effect grab a popular 80’s mix CD (which MUST include Wingers “She’s only 17″ & Culture Clubs “Do you really want to hurt me?”) put the volume on loud and say, “What did you say?” ,”Huh - I can’t hear you.” & “I am a big fan of your blog.” to your monitor - Also feel free to dim the lights and spill some beer on yourself once or twice.
How to get some schwag - This requires a dollar store, about 6 bucks, a quarter, some dice and a magic marker. Walk into the dollar store & roll the dice. Whatever the number is you go down that isle. Roll again and walk the amount of steps down the isle. Then flip the quarter; heads = turn right, tails = turn left - turn the way that you flipped & grab first item you see. Repeat this until the 6 dollars is spent or if you want a lot of schwag continue on until you are satisfied. But remember - this is going to carry on into the next part. Also pickup a bag and write “SMX” on it to carry all of you items. Once you are back home take the magic marker and pull up this web page select sponsors that you would like schwag from & draw their logo’s on some of the stuff that you purchased. Each time you do it say “Hey, can I get one of these?”, then thank yourself & put it into the Bag that you wrote SMX on.
How to have a networking lunch - This requires a prepared lunch - I would recommend a “Swanson Hungry Man Meal” - cook it in your microwave - following the instructions which should be conveniently located on the right hand side of the box - then take your SMX bag full of schwag, your tray of Hungry Man goodness & grab a soda out of your fridge. Now pull out all of the chairs at your kitchen table & ask “Is anyone sitting here?”, reply “No.” - then sit down. Now for about 2 minutes don’t say anything - just have an awkward silence - feel free to open your SMX schwag-bag and look at some of the items. Then finally say “So what company are you with.” Then immediately shove some mashed potatoes into your mouth, put your index finger in the air and attempt to say “One moment.” Now, finish eating and tell yourself your company & say what you do for it - reply “Thats interesting.” Endure another 2 minutes of awkward silence & then finally say “So is this your first SMX.” Now no matter what - LIE! Lie to yourself! Say “No, I went to the last one, pubcon & also an SES before.” You can’t let yourself know that you are a “noob”! Endure some more awkward silence - then finally say “It was nice meeting you.”, get up & dump your tray into the garbage & go up into your bedroom and take a nap.

I hope this helps bring some of the SMX experience home for us who could not attend it this year. The “left” coast was a bit to far for me - but I do look forward to my home city of New York in the fall! Hope everyone who is there is having a blast and I look forward to drunk twittering with you tonight!

** Hey this is Rae… I edited this post to add that if you wanna follow SMX on twitter, you can check out their official twitter account.

This post came from the Sugarrae Internet Marketing Blog maintained by Rae Hoffman.

It was going to be awesome…

Sunday, the day of god. The day that was bestowed upon me to take a shot of awesomeness & go down in history as the last guestwhore for guestwhore week round 2. My name is Michael Streko - I work for a SEO company in New York City & a Affiliate Network.

It was going to be amazing, it was going to be ground shattering - the pictures I had made were hysterical, this was my in! At conferences everyone would know me - they would ask to take pictures with me & ask for me to autograph random body parts.

But fate is a cold dark mistress - Who had other plans for me. As I drove to the bus stop, like I do every other work day of my life, I stopped behind an ambulance waiting to make a turn. The car behind me did not stop & smashed into me pushing me into the car in front of me.

Yeah I got a bit banged up & it sucked. But it does not suck as much as not being able to drop some bombs here on Rae’s blog.

So as I sit here at my home computer - because the one day of the year I forgot my damn power chord in NYC for my laptop. I have to bow out & apologize for not being able to post what I have planned. But have no fear - I will return for guest whore week 3 (if Rae lets me - please please please) & then I will be able to share with you some silly pics and what I had in store.

This post came from the Sugarrae Internet Marketing Blog maintained by Rae Hoffman.

Sarah East of Popcrunch Exposes Sugarrae

Special thanks to Sarah East of the Popcruch Show.

This post came from the Sugarrae Internet Marketing Blog maintained by Rae Hoffman.

7 Business Tips You Can Learn from your Neighborhood Whore

Good day fellow ~~whores~~ friends. While most of you are probably still drooling on your pillows watching Saturday morning cartoons today, I will be wondering who the hell will actually be reading this right now. For those that don’t know me, my name’s Joseph Stein from Area 1 Labs. When I’m not working or watching ingenious infomercial products I always enjoy learning new things or playing some good old Texas Hold’em.

Everyone is constantly saying that you need a business degree to understand how to do business. But I think that is outdated. Trust me when I say that you can learn everything you need to know from your neighborhood whore. So in the spirit of public service, I took it upon myself to get close and personal with some of them and then to report back to my readers. Now, I am not going to say exactly what I did during my time with them, but I think that was $200 well spent.

Well in all seriousness, this was never meant to be offensive to anyone. My goal was to explain a few dry business principles in a new and entertaining way. Like they say, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. If this method proves popular, hell I am willing to mingle with drug dealers, thieves and other degenerates just to see what we can learn from them.

Price is everything. The price you charge for your product will dictate the type of customer you get. $30 might attract a drunk from a local bar, but $250 might get you a businessman.
Get help when you need it. Working alone might allow you to keep more of your money, but getting professional help can get you to the next level. A pimp might be expensive, but his connections in the industry are priceless.
Diversify whenever you can. Providing one product can be profitable, but being able to target different markets can attract more customers. A successful prostitute is able to satisfy all types of fantasies.
Understand your clients. Your clients have different needs and wants; you must develop a sixth sense when it comes to their wishes. A good prostitute always knows which clients require which services.
Anticipate the market trends. Today your business may be booming, but tomorrow everything can change. Stay on top of the market, because you never know when a local police force will issue a raid.
Be forceful if necessary. Some of your clients might be undecided about the products you have to offer. In order to be successful, you must know when you have to push them and when you have to step back. Learn to be both a dominatrix and an innocent angel.
Good ol’ word of mouth. No matter how great your product happens to be, you will not be successful if no one knows who you are. Tell your regular clients to spread the word, and remind them that they might get a special treat for any future business they might bring.

One last thought, always look for merger possibilities with other companies. As in sex sells, but sex and drugs are a match made in heaven.

Disclaimer: No whores were harmed during the making of this blog post. Play safe and always use a ~~condom~~ linkcondom!

This post came from the Sugarrae Internet Marketing Blog maintained by Rae Hoffman.

Be a Normalizer - a C14N Exterminator

Hi Sugarrae readers! I’ve prepared something a little less fun today. To make my guest post worthwhile (and to donate about 3,000 words of heavy SEO material to Rae’s blog), we’re going back to SEO Kindergarten to review one of the most basic tenets of SEO – canonicalization (C14N) - in excruciating detail. Examples here include excerpts from one chapter of Advanced URL Management, a work in progress currently looking for a publisher. (If anyone from O’Reilly is reading this – let’s talk)

If you’re in a hurry, skip to the good part. Otherwise, read on. If you’re not interested in SEO, go watch me put mentos up my nose and immerse my head in Diet Coke.

Rae reminded all us whores not to forget introductions… Hello. My name is Ian Ring. I met Sugarrae during a stint working in Guelph a couple of years ago. I build websites long time. My interests include random poetry, building facebook apps, and eating sandwiches. Some of you may know me by a pseudonym. Let’s move on.

Become a Canonical URL Exterminator

Canonical issues arise when more than one URL may be used to deliver the same resource. Most canonical problems are caused by forgiving agents and overly tolerant servers – given a set of rules, these machines assume that even though you asked for B, you really wanted A. So it gives you the content of A, as though it is actually B. Fixing canonical bugs is achieved by the systematic removal or overriding of those assumptions.

The problem of canonical URLs is fairly basic SEO 101 stuff, and anyone who has been reading Rae’s blog is probably yawningly aware of what they are, why they’re bad, and so on. Yet even some experienced SEOs, while they know a Canonical Error when they see one, don’t know where to look to find them. Or they’ll know a few common problems, but they don’t have a systematic way to sweep a site looking for every possible canonicalization vulnerability.

My opinions reflect an assertion that bots are stupid. I’m not accusing any particular bot or engine, and actually the major engines are pretty good at interpreting URLs, avoiding double-indexing, and they generally handle URL normalization intelligently, notwithstanding some documented historical fuckups. But face it - when a page is badly indexed, the fault is rarely with the engine. If your URL architecture is perfect, there’ll be nothing for them to screw up. Indexing problems are ultimately the result of a webmaster not applying diligence in URL management, and/or placing unwarranted faith in bots not to be stupid.

Let’s define this as tenet #1: Bots are stupid. Assume this to be true a priori.

Canonical problems are elusive, because you’re not searching for something on the site that can be found by following links and running a spell-check. A Canonical error is one that you can only diagnose by “linking outside the box” – trying unusual, sometimes wacky, alternative URLs to see whether your site delivers dupe content.

To be certain that there are no Canonical problems on a site, you need to tackle the task systematically. Starting with the canonical URL, there are three ways that a URL can be modified. They are:
Omissions: something should be there but isn’t.
Inclusions: something is there that shouldn’t be.
Modifications: it’s there, but it’s wrong.

These aberrations may appear in any of the URL parts: protocol, port, subdomain, domain, file path, file name, and querystring. I’ll omit the user, password, and fragment portions of a URL since they rarely cause SEO or canonicalization problems.

First I’ll start with a few general tips for canonicalization.

Canonicalization Tips

Tip 1: Just use lower case

… for everything. I take a conservative approach to c14n. I prefer everything* in lower-case, even where the HTTP spec doesn’t indicate case sensitivity. I don’t care if the HTTP spec says domains are case insensitive … if your server is set up to convert all URLs to lower case, it solves a whole set of canonical issues all at once.

As a side effect of forcing the entire URL into lower case, I even force letters in escape sequences to lower case, e.g. “%3A” (a urlencoded colon) becomes “%3a”. Purists lay off - the official HTTP spec says escape sequences are case-insensitive.

Some might argue that it doesn’t matter if you use “%3A” or “%3a” – the engines will interpret and normalize URLs properly. I reply: Bots are stupid. See tenet #1.

* exception: user-entered values in the querystring should not be converted, eg. in a search query

Tip 2: If there’s a default value for something, omit it.

Well, you can either omit it or force it – for instance I tend to force the default “www” subdomain onto URLs if it’s missing. I could just as easily force it to be absent. Whatever – choose one, and be consistent.

Check each of part of the URL for any default values that can be omitted. For example, your default HTTP port is probably 80. So when someone requests this:
http://www.example.com:80/page.php, it’s the same as requesting
http://www.example.com/page.php. If you receive a request for port 80, you should redirect to the canonical URL with the default port removed.

The same default value hunting follows through the rest of the URL parts – the default file name may be “index.php”. The default protocol is http:// … try requesting your canonical URL with and without each of these bits to see if it is:

Canonical, and delivered OK as expected,
Non-canonical, and resolved by your browser, thus doesn’t need any redirection (e.g. most browsers will add the “http” for you, if you omit it.)
Non-canonical, and redirected by your server with a 301 Permanent Redirection status response, or
Erroneous, and handled with a 404 Not Found error page.

Dealing with default values is pretty simple, everywhere except in the querystring. Querystrings are very easy to use badly, and even when they’re used correctly, they can be canonically weak.

Some might argue that canonicalization in the querystring is a non-issue. They suggest that all the search engines always interpret and normalize URLs with querystrings properly, and it doesn’t matter if your URL has some weird shit after the question mark. I reply: Bots are stupid. See tenet #1.

Consider a script that shows paginated data. Page one of the data may have a URL like:
http://www.example.com/page.php?p=1
In this hypothetical situation, our friendly developers have realized that dependence on a pagination variable is assumptive, so they’ve written their code to show page 1, if no “p” variable is supplied. In fact, they show page 1 data whenever p is not a positive integer above 0. The intent is good, and they get marks for writing code that “fails gracefully”, but a better solution would have been to force a 301 redirection to the canonical URL, rather than show the same content without complaint.

The developers don’t tell you these things. You (as SEO) need to go in, look, test, and identify whether the omission or inclusion of a default value affects canonicalization.

First, choose which you’re going to canonicalize: the URL with the value, or the URL without. If you’re having trouble deciding, let me help you – leave it out. Brief URLs are good. And if you always choose the shorter option, you’ll never need to remember what method you used in which situations – so the rule of thumb will be: if the value is default, omit it.

Where the default value of querystring variable “p” is “1”, a diligent canonical exterminator will know that all of these are potential canonical dupes, and will check them:

http://www.example.com/page.php
http://www.example.com/page.php?
http://www.example.com/page.php?p=
http://www.example.com/page.php?p=1
http://www.example.com/page.php?p=1.0
http://www.example.com/page.php?p=1.00000
http://www.example.com/page.php?p=1.5
http://www.example.com/page.php?p=1&p=2
http://www.example.com/page.php?p=2&p=1
http://www.example.com/page.php?p=-1
http://www.example.com/page.php?p=-5
http://www.example.com/page.php?p=ianring

Naturally, if your web application uses URL rewriting to camouflage the querystring as a file path, the same issues will need to be verified in whatever parts of the URL they occupy. I see this done badly all the time.

Tip #3: If you’re going to fluff your URL, have the kajones to validate your fluff.

Too commonly, I’ll see URLs like this one:
http://www.example.com/restaurants/46335/jimmys-lunch-hamilton-ontario.php
The “46335” is a dead giveaway. That’s a database row identifier. Everything after that slash is URL fluff, put there to make the file name keywordy. Most of the time, developers are using a loose-ended regular expression to rewrite the URL, and they’re not verifying that “46335” is actually Jimmy’s Lunch in Hamilton. Ha! I guarantee, 9 times out of 10, you could request this, and get the same thing:
http://www.example.com/restaurants/46335/i-can-type-anything-i-want-here.php

Note to scraping hobbyists: integer row IDs are lovely because they’re so predictable. When you find a loose end like this one, use a spreadsheet to construct URLs with all the numbers from 1 to a kajillion. Save it as a TXT file and feed the URL list into your favourite downloading program. Parse the HTML you get back, et voila: you have stolen their entire database of stuff.

Note to malicious competitors and hackers: load up your blog spammer with a kajillion permutations of that link, each with a different random phrase as the file name. Stir and wait. Then dance with joy as the bots discover a kajillion different URLs showing the same content on your competitor’s site. Goodbye, organic traffic!

Note to webmasters: don’t make it easy for scraping hobbyists and malicious competitors and hackers. Keep your canonicalization orifices sealed.

Example from a famous website:
http://www.amazon.com/indigo+can+bite+my+anus/dp/1597491543/i+can+write+anything+i+want+here/yes+i+can/you+can+too

And another:
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/amazon-sucks-donkey-balls/9780470170779-item.html

Tip #4: Be diligent with your Querystrings

The querystring is where most potential canonical issues reside, and they’re the most difficult ones to fix. The problems you might find in the querystring include:

variables there that aren’t needed
default values being defined
variables not in a canonical sequence
values out of range
lingering state variables

I’ll take them one by one:

Variables there that aren’t needed

Say you have a URL like http://www.example.com/page.php?a=1&b=2
If the value of “b” isn’t needed on this page, it shouldn’t be there.

Every script (I say this confidently) can enumerate what variables it needs to identify a resource. When anything appears in the querystring that isn’t expected or needed, it’s a potential canonical issue.

To fix this, have all your scripts create an array of valid variables for itself. Pass that array into a function that iterates through that list, picking those variables out of the querystring to create a new array. Join that new array on “&” and compare it to the original querystring. If the strings are different, reattach the new one and redirect. This routine is called “scrubbing”.

A querystring scrub will remove garbage added by referring links, such as affiliate codes, tracking identifiers, or just garbage: http://www.example.com/page.php?foo=bar

Some will argue that this is a non-issue, and search engines won’t care if there’s an affiliate tracking code on the URL – they’ll always index things perfectly and intelligently. I reply: Bots are stupid. See tenet #1.

Default values being defined

This is discussed under Tip 2 – when your querystring contains any default value that doesn’t need to be there, remove it.

Variables not in canonical sequence

I’ve had many arguments about this one. To a programmer, there is no difference between these two URLs:
http://www.example.com/page.php?a=1&b=2
http://www.example.com/page.php?b=2&a=1

They both describe the same collection of variables, with their values equally accessible by name. But when compared as strings, the URLs are different. The common (and very reasonable) argument is “it doesn’t matter”. My response is my mantra: Bots are stupid. See tenet #1.

The simplest (and suggested) fix for this problem is to push your querystring collection into an array, sort it alphabetically by name, rejoin the array with “&”, then compare the sorted string to the original. If it changed, reattach the sorted querystring and redirect.

Values out of range

This one is nefarious and very common. Revisiting our hypothetical paginated results, imagine that our document has only 13 pages. What is the expected response from these URLs?
http://www.example.com/page.php?page=14 (out of range)
http://www.example.com/page.php?page=500 (way out of range)
http://www.example.com/page.php?page=-1 (negative pages – duh)
http://www.example.com/page.php?page=ianring (not even a positive integer)
http://www.example.com/page.php?page= (undefined)

… I’d expect all of these requests to return a 404 Not Found. If you’re especially kindhearted, you might give the user a 301 sending them to page one, especially with that last undefined one. If the response is anything besides those two, it’s a canonical issue.

Loose value validation is another instance where you’ve inadvertently created a potentially infinite number of URLs that show the same resource. A competitor could create a kajillion such URLs and send them out as bot food, and those bots could see them all as dupes.

Lingering state variables

These are really annoying.
http://www.example.com/page.php?back=/prevpage.php
The developer thought it would be nice to put the referrer in the querystring, so scripts on the page could send you back where you came from. This is somewhat tolerable on “login” pages, when you’re wrenched away to authenticate, then after signing in, flung back to the page you wanted. But generally it’s a bad idea to put state variables in the querystring. Lots of people do it. Sometimes there’s no alternative.

Or how about this gem:
http://www.example.com/page.php?referrer=Adwords
That last one – the “referrer” – is not needed to identify a resource. It’s a tracking code. Lest some silly bot think that the page with “referrer” is different from the one without, your best practice is to “scrub” the querystring – put your referrer data into a session or database, remove that variable and redirect.

Exterminating Canonical Errors, Step By Step

Now, let’s get down to the task at hand: non-canonical URL extermination.

You will need:

A live website to be audited
A spreadsheet program, like Excel
A downloading/link checking tool that returns a report of status headers.
A Taxonomy of Canonical Errors (below)

Choose any page on the site for which you’re doing a canonicalization audit. Decide upon a canonical URL, keeping in mind the tips lovingly revealed above. Then using the taxonomy below, construct variations of that URL with an assortment of aberrations, all of which you would hope return a 404 Not Found error, or a 301 redirection to your canonical URL. This list will be URLs that are incorrect, but could possibly deliver dupe content. Warning: it could be quite a long list! One that I created recently using computed permutations of 10 different potential canonicalization errors produced a list of about 1700 URLs, after many with invalid syntax were removed.

Put all your aberrations into a spreadsheet or txt file. Feed this list into a downloading script, and generate a report showing the status header returned from each request.

Interpret the report. None of the URLs should return a 200 OK – they must all return either a 301 to the canonical url, or a 404 if the URL is too ambiguous.

You’ll want to repeat this process with a variety of pages on the site. Include the home page, some interior content pages, and especially any pages that have dynamic content, or which rely on a querystring.

I have divided the most common canonical issues into a taxonomy, published for the first time below. Please excuse the bulleted lists; Rae’s CSS seems to override my styling and I can’t be bothered to fix it

A Taxonomy of Canonicalization Errors

1 extra characters in the URL
- 1.1 in the subdomain, e.g. “www”
- 1.2 in the port, e.g. “:80”
- 1.3 in the file path, see URL fluff
- 1.4 in the file name, e.g. “index.php”, also see URL fluff
- 1.5 in the querystring
- 1.6 in the file path
  - 1.6.1 extra inserted slashes
  - 1.6.2 dotted modifiers, eg “x/y/z/../../a/b/../../../page.php”
- 1.7 in the querystring
  - 1.7.1 A “?” with no query after it
  - 1.7.2 More than one “?”
  - 1.7.3 Extra “&” characters
  - 1.7.4 fictitious querystring variables
2 missing characters in the URL
- 2.1 in the file path
  - 2.1.1 missing trailing slash on path
- 2.2 in the querystring
  - 2.2.1 undeclared and undefined variables (eg “?a=” or “?=2”)
3 modified/incorrect characters in the URL
- 3.1 in the subdomain
  - 3.1.1 see if “blog.example.com” delivers the same content as “example.com/blog”
- 3.2 in the domain
  - 3.2.1 using IP address instead of the domain name
- 3.3 in the file path
  - 3.3.1 extended characters, and case sensitivity
  - 3.3.2 inconsistent use of “+” and “%20”
- 3.4 in the file name
  - 3.4.1 badly mapped extensions, e.g. *.php, *.htm, *.html all mapped to the same script
  - 3.4.2 extended characters, and case sensitivity
  - 3.4.3 inconsistent use of “+” and “%20”
- 3.5 in the querystring
  - 3.5.1 variables not in canonical sequence
  - 3.5.2 out of range querystring values
  - 3.5.3 lingering state variables
  - 3.5.4 inconsistent use of “+” and “%20”

If you use this list to find canonicalization problems, you’ve done a good audit. The next step is to bring your findings back to the developers and webmaster, and get them to fix the problems. If the webmaster is serious about canonicalization, it behooves them to build a URL normalizer – a script that runs on each page load looking for known patterns and rewriting, redirecting, scrubbing, sessionizing, and acting appropriately. Many of these issues can be solved with regular expressions in a Rewrite module such as Apache’s .htaccess file or ISAPI Rewrite for .NET. Others require diligent refactoring in web applications for value validation to throw exceptions to a canonicalization routine. The construction of that URL normalizer is outside the scope of guestwhore duties.

If your website is properly guarded against canonicalization errors, I should be able to throw any messed-up URL at it and it will behave predictably and appropriately. And know that if your SEO expert doesn’t find these problems, your visitors (including bots) certainly will.

Happy normalizing!

Now go watch me put mentos up my nose and immerse my head in Diet Coke.

This post came from the Sugarrae Internet Marketing Blog maintained by Rae Hoffman.

SEO Osmosis Quiz

Rhea’s required intro:
My name’s Rhea as in Dia-, Gono- and Pizza. [ew] Yeah, my parents doomed me to playground hell. In 2004 I stumbled into the acronym-filled SEO world and have since grown to love it. I write occasionally (emphasis on occasionally) for Search Engine Journal (check it out here) and work full-time as an Internet Marketing Manager for a staffing and recruitment company.

I’m guestwhoring it up, because my buddy, Graywolf wants me to babysit for him and the Mrs at the next Pubcon. Rather than pay for my mad big-sis skills, he begged Rae to give me a shot while she basked in the sun and consumed copious amounts of alcohol. I might have blurred the lines on that, but the point is I’m here and you’re reading this.

Like every guestwhore it’s stressful trying to carve a niche into the colorful world of obscenities that is Sugarrae. Following in the path of Aaron “TheMadHat” Chronister’s drunken debauchery, Gyutae’s sheeple and Susan’s self-deprecating Girl’s Guide to Getting Ready for Conferences, what’s this girl to do?!

After a few weeks of thinking, “f*ck, I should really get a head start” the time has come to put out in unflinching guestwhore fashion. For the task, I turned to my bestfriend - my husband, Brad Cornelius.

Rhea: Say hi Brad!

Brad: Hi. Does anyone actually read this thing?

Rhea: I’ll let you talk to Rae about that.

Brad: Who’s Rae?

Rhea: Nevermind.

My theory is that by testing Brad on the fundamentals of SEO, I’ll see how much information he’s retained through osmosis. A quick side note, Brad’s a freaking genius that just tried out for Jeopardy, so if he doesn’t get everything right, I’m chalking it up to the uncanny ability of all husbands to block out their wives.

SEO Osmosis Quiz:

Rhea: What does search engine optimization stand fo-…. dammit!

Brad: What?

[pause]

Rhea: I mean, what does SEO stand for?

Brad: Um… and I was worried this test was going to be really hard.

Rhea: Shut up!

Brad: You’re as bad at this as telling jokes.

Rhea: Ok, so we know I’m stupid. So, what does SEO mean?

Brad: Helping a website or client rank as high as possible in search engines for keywords that they choose.

Rhea: How does a search engine work?

Brad: It uses computers…

….

I guess search engines look at sites and classify them for certain things based on other things like links and text and stuff like that.

Rhea: Now who sounds like the idiot, huh?

[pause]

I meant to say I love you and thank you for doing this with me.

Ok, what elements of a website are most important to SEO?

Brad: [long pause and frowny face] I know links seem to be important because people sometimes pay for them.* And then I would just guess text, too.

*Shut up Brad! Matt Cutts, my husband is just saying that because he heard it somewhere else.

Rhea: What kind of text on a website?

Brad: I don’t know what you mean… like headings and stuff?

[pause]

Rhea: Anyways, what’s a 301 redirect?

Brad: It’s telling you that the thing doesn’t exist where you’re looking for it, it’s at another URL. I don’t know, something about it being somewhere else and I know there’s 300s, 400s and 500s. What’s the one that tells you the page and stuff has been moved?

[pause]

Rhea: You’re getting warmer.

Brad: Oh, it’s on a different server now!

Rhea: Let’s go to a different question. What’s page rank?

Brad: Something you don’t want to lose once you have it.

Rhea: Exactly. How do you get page rank?

Brad: All I know for sure is the length of time you’ve been around helps and I’m guessing traffic contributes as well. That and your links as well.

Rhea: What’s link juice?

Brad: You mean linkbait?

Rhea: What’s a link condom?

Brad: I have no idea, but is there something you’re trying to tell me?

Rhea: Ok, fine, what’s linkbait?

Brad: Something you put on your site that you think will be popular that people will want to show to others and link to it. Something that will be viral in a sense. Is that a good answer?

Rhea: You’ll get your grade at the end.

[pause for kinky look]

Name four search engines.

Brad: Google. Yahoo. Ask. Ask Jeeves… is that the same thing as Ask? Um, I think doesn’t MSN have a search engine?

Rhea: What’s social media?

Brad: Websites that allow people to interact with one another and create an online presence.

Rhea: Can you name five social networks?

Brad: Facebook. MySpace. Digg. Twitter. Is Stumble a social network?

Rhea: What’s a sitemap?

Brad: It’s where it shows you everything on a site in an outline form. So you can see everything on one page.

Rhea: What’s a robots.txt file?

Brad: A what? I don’t know.

Rhea: Why is Wikipedia ranked so high on Google?

Brad: Because each page has a million links to it and other pages.

Rhea: What’s the universal search model?

Brad: It’s a new reality show where they’re trying to find models.

Rhea: How does Google make money?

Brad: I guess through Pay-Per-Click, through paid results.

Rhea: What’s an old SEO technique that people used to use to get their sites ranked well in Google that doesn’t work anymore?

Brad: I can think of a recent one. Your friend that sent out a quiz to a bunch of people and it had a link embedded in it that had nothing to do with what the quiz was about. And Matt Cutts was pissed.

Rhea: I think that’s a good note to end on. Your grade: D- for quality and A+ for your ability to forget everything I’ve ever told you. Seriously, we talked about 301 and 302 redirects for ten minutes the other night. You have an unreal memory, what the hell? Do you want to redeem yourself?

Brad: How?

Rhea: When was the Battle of the Bulge?

Brad: December 1944… more precisely, the week before Christmas.

Rhea: Who was the King of England during the War of the Roses?

Brad: There wasn’t one, that’s what it was about. The Yorks and Lancasters were fighting over it.

Rhea: What’s the butterfly effect?

Brad: More precisely known as, sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

Rhea: Nevermind. We’re done here. Just wait until you get on Jeopardy and there’s a whole category on Google!

This post came from the Sugarrae Internet Marketing Blog maintained by Rae Hoffman.

The Camera Adds 10 Pounds or A Girl’s Guide to getting ready for conference season

If this is entirely incoherent, it isn’t my fault. I blame Lisa. Speaking of which, she’s writing my introduction for me so:

[Hi. I’m not sure how I got commissioned into writing this, but okay. If you’re scratching your head trying to figure out who the hell this Susan Esparza chick is, I’ll help you out. Susan is Senior Editor at Bruce Clay, Inc., which basically means she corrects my blog typos, plays a lot of Scrabulous, and silently resents the attention I get. She’s been at Bruce Clay for 3 years and in her free time collects dolls that cost more than my rent. She doesn’t like to go out in public.

Oh, and I’ll be adding some interjections. I can’t let Susan have the whole spotlight. Huzzah! -- Lisa]

Thank you, oh millstone around my neck. It’s your fault I got tapped to do this in the first place.

Like everyone else posting this week, I thought of and discarded about 19 million ideas for this post. [Isn’t it funny how the fear of Rae breeds self doubt? -- Lisa] I even thought about Skyping Lisa and making like the FemMozzers but realized taking the easy way outwould be even less clever the second time around. Then in my frantic delirium, it came to me! ~~MozCon~~ SMX is next week! Which is when the real panic set in.

Here’s the problem with conferences. People want to take pictures with you. God only knows why because I look terminally exhausted and usually lost and entirely jaundiced under those ever so flattering fluorescent lights (maybe it’s some kind of drinking game?). Anyway, this camera whoring isn’t a big deal if you’re a guy. No one cares what guys look like in their pictures so they always come off looking decent even if they’re scruffy, unshaven and rumpled [Long live the SEO Book! -- Lisa]. After all, they’re respected SEOs or PPC gurus or Pretty Princesses. But for the double X chromosomes? Break out the Photoshop and the soft focus lenses because God forbid you have to face the results otherwise. For all the talk that this industry is becoming less of a boys’ club and women are just as respected as men… blah blah…whatever lame excuses they’ve come up with this time. It’s all nonsense. I saw the way freaking iJustine got mobbed at Pubcon. You bastards like the pretty girls better. And by pretty, folks? I mean skinny. Look at this here:

[We’re preeetty! -- Lisa]

In case you live under a rock or something, that’s Rae, Jane, Lisa and Rebecca at Pubcon. Notice that not a single woman in that picture over size 6. How the hell is that even fair? It’s not. You know the last time I was a size 6? Seventh grade. And I guarantee you I’m going to have to be in at least one picture with Lisa if not a solid dozen. Look at how tiny she is! She’s only an inch shorter than I am, for Christ’s sake! Beside her I look like a mammoth. Emergency measures are called for. [Is now a bad time to mention all the chocolate and pizza and beer I had this weekend? Mmm, beer. – Lisa]

Now the nice folks over at SEO Fights Fat are doing this the right way. (Why wasn’t I asked to join that? Don’t they know I’m in desperate need of motivation? I even have a great charity. I’m a firm supporter of Arch Angels which funds treatment for eating disorders. Yes, this is ironic but it really is my pet cause.) I don’t have time for the right way. I have a week. You know how much you can lose in a week the ‘right’ way? That’s right, Jack and Shit. That’s why we do things in a way that would make Mary Kate proud. Here’s the two step plan for getting in shape for SMX:

First things first, stop eating junk food. Soda is right out. All that chocolate from Valentine’s Day? Verboten. And don’t even think about carbs. Carbs are well known to be an alien life form sent to earth to add fat to your thighs. Science has proven it.

Step two? Stop eating. Completely. Okay, maybe something just to kick start metabolism but that’s it. Sure you’re so hungry that your stomach is actually gnawing on your spine and you get lightheaded just from breathing but nothing tastes as good as thin feels, right? Right. There’s another hidden upside to this diet. It’s preparing you for the actual conference where you live on coffee in the morning and alcohol at night because you’re too busy liveblogging to eat.

Try that for a week. Make sure you drink lots of water and green tea. If you have to eat something, embrace the joy of carrot sticks or celery! No dressing; that’s cheating. If you’re too weak for a straight seven day fast, then you can have some protein, but no carbs. I’m not kidding about the alien life forms.

So what I’m saying is, when you see me at a show, tell me I’m skinny. Make sure you sound like you mean it or I’ll cut you. And for the love of God, no, I don’t want to take a picture! [You sound stressed. Have a cookie. – Lisa]

This post came from the Sugarrae Internet Marketing Blog maintained by Rae Hoffman.

Lamb Chops Anyone? Don’t Be an SEO Sheep

Hello everyone,

For those of you that don’t know (and that’s probably all of you), my name is Gyutae Park and I work as a professional SEO at a top agency in New York City (blah blah blah). I also run a blog on Internet marketing strategy at Winning the Web so be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed for some of my online tips and experiences.

Now that I’ve gotten that introduction out of the way, you’re probably wondering who the hell I am and what I’m doing on Rae’s blog. As a matter of fact, I’m not much of a potty mouth so the tone of this post might be completely different from what you might expect here. But hey if Will Smith can sell records without cussing, I think I can manage to make a fool of myself without using the special nouns, adjectives, and verbs that account for a large percentage of Rae’s content in keyword density.

Honestly I didn’t think I’d receive the honor of being a guest whore (ironic aint it?). I just can’t seem to lose these days (I’ll have to test this in Las Vegas next week) and my lucky winning streak the past month has included a free full conference pass to Affiliate Summit West, a free ticket to Elite Retreat, an honorary mention in Bruce Clay’s SEO Charity Contest, and now this - real live guest WHORE status at Sugarrae.com. Rae doesn’t know this but I’m also representing the beautiful Garden State of New Jersey - land of full service gas pumps, tax-free clothing and food, endless malls and diners, and well… pollution. Not only do I sit at home Sphinning Rae’s articles but I secretly follow Rae around everywhere she goes (ok, I’m just kidding here. I’m not a creepy stalker, I swear). I guess that would make me Rae’s biatch. Speaking of which, I’d like to theme this post around something similar, but it’s literally a whole new animal. Sheep. People are like sheep and it pisses me off.

In the spirit of President’s Day, I was watching some of the US elections race coverage on CNN when the commentator noted that Obama had an advantage because of momentum. People were voting for him simply because he had the lead. WTH? The next president could make or break the future of the United States and here people are treating the elections like a game of preseason football. Doesn’t seem right to me. In an ideal world, people would do their own research and stand up for what they believe. In the real world, people are sheep, following others around aimlessly and without purpose. Kool-Aid anyone?

In the same way, the SEO world runs rampant with sheep. Newbies worship some of the SEO “experts” and follow them without question, not knowing whether or not they are good shepherds or wolves in sheep’s clothing. There are always going to be bad apples in the industry and they have ruined the reputation of SEO for their own profit. But the root of the problem lies in people - lazy sheep who don’t want to do their own research. Seriously, when was the last time you questioned a tactic or went against the grain? Guys like Eric Lander and Michael Gray are doing it. Are you? (Hm, trick question) Just because Matt Cutts says something doesn’t mean he’s out for your best interests.

And with that I conclude my guest whore duties. Let’s not be sheep, people. Sheep aren’t leaders and sheep are slaughtered. Don’t aimlessly follow the crowd or support a group because it’s popular. In fact, don’t volunteer yourself as a guest whore at a popular SEO blog… (oh crap). Baaaah.

Check me out at Winning the Web

This post came from the Sugarrae Internet Marketing Blog maintained by Rae Hoffman.

58 Reasons Why Sugarrae Is Paying For My Rehab

Guestwhore post from TheMadHat

So many moons ago ~~Rea~~ Rae offered to let me be a whore mongering pirate and do a guest post. Well…what the hell am I supposed to write? It had to be something a little different than calling someone a douchebag or teaching you how to piss off the Cutter. Coincidentally this was the same week I purchased my digital HD camcorder so I figured it would be a nice place to do some video publishing.

Lesson 1: Don’t try and learn complicated video editing software 2 days before something is due, otherwise you’ll be up for two days straight.

Lesson 2: I forgot.

Lesson 3: Use more brightness and contrast when uploading to that piece of shit YouTube.

So anyway, I started working on this post on January 11th…making this the most effort I’ve ever put into a blog post. Ever. I think I’ve actually built websites faster. That’s 37 days for you Neanderthals that don’t have a calculator. So one of the “rules” was I had to introduce myself, which I did in the video but I still haven’t figured out how to adjust the volume in different portions of the same track. Fuck off if you don’t like it. Here is what I said:

“Hi, my name is Aaron (The Mad hat, Monkey Ball SEO, poor schmuck who spent $200 on a bud light, newest resident of the Betty Ford Clinic) and here is my website in case you’re interested”.

So here’s a toast to you Sugarrae. 58 actually….in less than 2 minutes.

*** And since either I’m an idiot, or because I’ve hacked my blog to death to get it to embed video I can’t get it to embed here. So just go give Google another damn page view: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL95-W5EhO8 ***

That was a lot of work. I’m never drinking again. Or at least until Tuesday. Since this is an SEO blog, I figured I’d lay out some analytics for you:

* Days: 37
* Shots: 58
* Number of Jagermeister shots: 57
* Number of other crappy shots: 1
* Bottles of Jager: 2.3 or so
* Times I vomited making this blog post: 0
* Times my friends vomited making this blog post: 1
* Times my friends got cut off from the bar: 1
* Taxi cabs called: ~~Error Javascript disabled~~
* Money spent: Fuck
* Time spent learning how to use Sony Vegas video software: Too fucking long
* Feelings about said software: Good
* Time before liver transplant will be required: -1,234 days
* Shots not recorded because I forgot my camera: 6 or 7. We’ll go ahead and toast Guestwhore Manager for taking care of the blog this week with those.
* Times arrested: 0
* Times should have been arrested: ~~Error Javascript disabled~~
* Times I had trouble explaining what I was doing: 147

So welcome to Guestwhore Week. Be kind to dogs, don’t be kind to cats, and…don’t be mean to super affiliates or you’ll get a C & D (sorry, couldn’t resist). Out.

This post came from the Sugarrae Internet Marketing Blog maintained by Rae Hoffman.