I know certain web application depend on Session ID’s to handle unique user experience.

You know you’ve caught a case of Session ID’s when you’re browsing a site and your URL’s have nice random characters and number appended to it. Basically they are a real eyesore.

But more importantly, from what I understand Session IDs can create duplicate content issues for your website. You no longer have one page with one URL, but you can have thousands of unique URL pointing to one single page.

Google might crawl your site one day and pick up all your links with one session ID, and the next time they crawl they pick up a whole set of new links pointing to the same pages because the session ID has changed. That does suck!

Disabling PHP Session ID’s is not that complicated and there are a verity of tricks that can prevent search engines from picking them up. You can be simple and flip a global switch and turn off Session ID’s all together, or target the bots directly.

A few years ago I launched a site running OS Commerce and I had Session IDs enabled. Google did its thing and a few weeks later my results were a mess.

Now word on the street is that Google can handle Session ID’s much better then a few years ago. So is it worth ones time to even think about Session IDs’? I mean, with all those big brains working at the G-Factory you would think they could decipher Session ID’s.

Now I lean towards being better safe than sorry and I turn off my Session ID’s.

No Cookie, no Washy!

I’m constantly hiring freelance graphical talent on Elance and I’m seeing some real deceiving tactics taking place.

Before I hire a new graphical / web designer I review every bidder’s portfolio in detail. It is a time consuming task but I want to make sure I get the most bang for my buck. When I see a portfolio that I like, I send it to my short list.

Over the past few months I’ve had many projects going on at the same time and because of this I’ve caught on to some underhanded practices by many freelance bidders.

For starters many of the custom web design work I’ve seen in the bidder’s portfolios are not unique. In fact quite a few are common templates anyone can find on the web for $40. It has become apparent to me many bidders are sharing their portfolio work and the majority of templates are easily found publicly.

Secondly, there are some large foreign companies who are bidding under multiple account names but they all end up at the same company. I know this because I hired two different companies to do some work for me. During private messaging with both companies I ended up with two different private messages on two different projects where I hired two unique companies but they mistakenly signed the same signature. Oooops!

How Do I Combat This?

The value with freelance work on services like Elance is unbeatable. But a lot of time can be wasted if you hire the wrong company and they send you crap!

For the past few months I now send all graphical artists / web design bidders a small description of what my vision is. During the bidding phase I private message my first round draft picks a letter requiring that they show me a unique rough mock-up of my ideas.

If they can not do that, then I do not hire them. And the ones that do it, they make it to my shortlist. This allows me to see just how qualified they really are. I should give credit of this idea to Design Outpost. Back when I used to use them, all artists compete openly and they can all see each others work.

I personally don’t want my work “so open” to the world. So my solution is a hybrid of the two.

When using Elance, do not forget to read all the bidders last 6 months Feedback / Review / Earning and try to even get the bidders to speak with you over the telephone before hiring them. Because of the amount of work I do overseas I have a dedicated Skype line just for this purpose.

You’ve been warned!

Chris Winfield site 10e20 has launched the first of a four part series written by Jake Matthews title 2008 Presidential Candidate Search Marketing Face-off.

For those of you, who care about Search Marketing and want to gauge how those with the deepest of pockets handle their SEM, should check out this series.

By reading that post and following many of the links you will find a wealth of information.

One of my favorite shows is the Deadliest Catch on the Discovery Channel. After every show I shake my head in amazement watching what those crab hunters do for a living on the Bearing Sea.

There is now a new show on the History Channel called Ice Road Truckers.

According to Electric Artist News last nights Series Premier became the #1 Original Premier Telecast of all time with millions of viewers.

Now the show definitely is following the Deadliest Catch formula which makes it intriguing. It’s funny that the Deadliest Catch uses “Wanted Dead or Alive” by Bon Jovi and Ice Road Truckers went with “Living on the Edge” by Aerosmith.

As with each episode of the Deadliest Catch where we watch several crab fisherman compete for crabs we watch Ice Road Truckers compete to see who can haul more truck loads to diamond mines way up in the artic.

The premise here is the truckers are hauling huge loads of goods while traveling hundreds on miles on an ice sheet that covers several lakes. There is a three month window where the lakes freeze enough to handle the weight of trucks but it takes one month to build the road. So truckers only have 60 days to haul their goods north before the ice melts. Apparently temperatures were warmer last year so they did not have enough time and have to make up their work this year.

Obviously we want no one to get hurt but I do look forward to seeing some truck crash through the ice…

(Picture taken from my wifes office in Hollywood)

Ocean’s 13

I want my money and time back for seeing this movie. Ocean’s 12 was horrible and this one was right up there with it. I thought Oceans 11 was a terrific movie and hoped they would correct themselves on 13 for the lame plot line of 12.

Steven Soderberg, the man who brought us Oceans 11 and Erin Brokovich has no idea how to make a good heist movie. There was absolutely no surprise or suspense and there is nothing more annoying then introducing new characters at the end of a movie to help complete the story. I call those the “How Convenient” plot twist.

The back and forth with time got annoying but to top it off the actors cool one liners became tiring. We accepted the fact Clooney and Pit were cool in Oceans 11, which is why we came back for more. It appeared the script was just full of bad one-liners.

In typical Hollywood fashion they tried to spoon feed elements which they thought the audience wanted but they got it all wrong.

Season Finale of the Sopranos

Seriously, for weeks I was anticipating the season finale as I had been watching the show religiously since 1999. I am sure there are many people who found it profound that they focused the last few episodes on AJ’s depression but I wanted more Tony Soprano mob action. For years AJ has been nothing more than a bitchy character and I think our time could have better been spent focusing on the mobs business.

How they ended this show was so infuriating I almost called my cable company and canceled my service because I thought my cable went out. I felt that little ending stunt of theirs was like a big “F-U”. It goes to show you can have a loyal fan for 8 long years and it takes only a few seconds to flip them.

24

Basically we stopped watching this show mid season. The blowing up of Valencia, Ca was sweet action but the whole concept of Jack Bauer had jumped the shark several seasons ago. I found this past season long and boring. It just felt like work and a commitment I was not willing to engage.

Ask.com Commercials

I have now scene these new Ask.com commercials of people singing in Broadway fashion a few times and every time I see them I keep thinking I am watching an Ebay Ad. I think whoever put these ads together should be fired. For years Ebay has set the stage for those type of musical commercials and Ask is doing nothing more but making me think of Ebay while spending millions on television advertising.

I am not the morality police and for sure the last person to stand on any soapbox and preach to people. And I certainly could care less how people choose to earn their livings. I say to each to their own.

What I do care is when I find out someone has cunningly used me as a tool to perpetrate their fraud or has outright used my identity for personal gain.

Yesterday morning I received a telephone call from a person who represented himself as a concierge from a company that my wife and I had hired to move our possessions across town for the end of this month.

After explaining to me who he was, he went on to tell me that a part of my moving package included coupons and special deals for many of the utility companies I might need in my up & coming move. He wanted my permission if he could send me an e-mail with these “special rates”.

I jokingly said as long as he does not give my information to anyone else he had my permission to email me the special rates. I then provided him with my email address and the conversation ended.

A few hours later I received an email. Not from my friendly concierge but from a Broadband reseller who relayed a message to me from our local Cable company.

“Congratulations! Your order has been placed directly with *** successfully!”

The e-mail went on to display all my personal information and notifying me that I had ordered their Premium Cable and High Speed Online including HDTV packages.

Being that my wife and I are up-to our eyes with moving boxes and the two of us have been on the phone everyday talking to different utility companies, I was not sure if she had changed over our Cable.

I quickly pinged her with an Instant Message asking her if she had ordered Cable for us and she said No!

I then called the Cable Company and attempted to explain to them what had just happened. But the customer support representative went on to explain to me that I must have been the one who ordered the service. Seriously, for several minutes he tried to convince me that I had been the one or my wife had been the one who ordered their service.

I tried to tell them someone had committed fraud but the guy did not want to hear what I had to say. So I asked to speak with his supervisor and when he got on the line I attempted to explain what had happened. The supervisor did not care at all either.

I was practically pulling my hair out while adamantly explaining I was not the one who signed up for their service. I requested that they cancel that order and that they investigate their resellers as one of them slammed me into a service I had never requested.

The supervisor not only told me to take up my problem with the reseller “since I obviously was doing business with them”, but he made it very difficult for me to cancel the order I had never placed with them. After a few more minutes of arguing with the supervisor I was then able to cancel the order.

I was just about to blow up at the guy when I said “I am helping you guys out because obviously you have resellers trying to fraudulently collect commissions, but it’s obvious you don’t care, so be it!”

At this point I called my moving company.

When calling them I found out that their company uses a third party to handle their “concierge offerings”. After getting the name of the concierge company I explained to the moving company what had taken place and that I never given authorization to the moving company to give my personal information out, let alone request to be signed up to any utility services. The fact of the matter was, I never signed one document with the moving company, not even for the move so for them to give my information (or sell my personal information) is a complete personal violation.

Now I called the Concierge.

This was a treat. When I called I did not start off shooting from the hip. I had mentioned to the first person who answered my call that they put me on the phone with the man who called me earlier that day. I did not have the name of the guy but I mentioned I had more questions from previously and wanted to finish our conversation.

Apparently I was told this was not such an easy task and the guy who I was now on the phone with made it clear I must speak with him. I told him I did not want to speak with him and this conversation went around in circles for a few minutes before he told me he has to look me up on a computer that “has more power” because my request was so unique.

I am not kidding – that is exactly what he said. For him to track down who called me originally he needed a supercomputer.

I finally got a supervisor on the phone who then handed me off to the guy who originally called me. I asked the guy to explain to me what rights he had to sign me up to a service I never authorized.

Turns out, the guy was new to the job and he explained it was innocent mistake. We spoke for 10 minutes and while doing so I could hear many people in the background reading the same pitch I had heard earlier that day.

I then asked to speak with his supervisor. After a few minutes of speaking the supervisor he tells me he had a listen to the original phone conversation on recording and that he admits I was mislead by their company and they were at fault.

Here is a breakdown of what happened:

1. A moving company who I have signed nothing with gave my information to another company.

2. This second company calls me on the phone and records my conversation without telling me I was being recorded or asking for my permission.

3. This second company represents that they are with my moving company and they want to send me an email with discounts as a value added service.

4. This second company then takes my personal information they got from the moving company, signs me up to a local Cable company without my permission to fraudulently collect commissions. (I am only guessing this part but I figure since cable companies have a monopoly on our local area, chances are pretty high we would use this company for our Cable, unless we had Dish. When signing up with said Cable Company this second company would get paid out for referring the business.)

5. The supervisor of this second company admits to me that they are wrong for what they did and offers to send me a “Visa Gift Card”.

At this point I had enough and got off the phone.

Now I wonder what I should do about this. What I think happened here is what is called Slamming and long distance telephone companies were prone to doing things like this back in the day. But from what I understand it has became illegal.

What would you do?

I’ve been getting emails from buddies who use MSN Messenger telling me that they never see me online any more. This is strange since I am online everyday and I could see some of them using Trillian Basic.

So, what gives? Why could I see them and they could not see me?

Turns out you need to open up the MSN Messenger application once in a while because you have to grant people the right to see you when your online. (I’ve been adding people to my buddy list directly through Trillian, not MSN Messenger or AOL and thats the mistake).

I had to reinstall MSN Messenger again but once I did and logged in there must have been 11 or 12 messages from friend waiting for me to approve them. Some messages were from guys I have not spoken to in 7 years or so.

So I went in and approved my peeps and before I knew it, I was getting tagged with IM’s from all over the world.

Its kind of like opening a can of worms… Once the flood of friend IM’s came in, it dawned on me how good I had it when it was quiet. ~ Just kidding ~

For a moment there I was fuming at EarthLink. They are not my ISP and as far as I know I never downloaded anything from them. Yet the past few days if I mistyped any domain name in the address bar in both FireFox or IE I would end up on one of their landing error pages. (EarthLink DNS Error Page)

At first I just ignored it but then when I thought about it I just got pissed. I thought “Why in the hell is EarthLink on my machine and what right do they have to make money off of me with their own error pages?”

I ran virus scanning and adware tools to clean my machine. I searched my regedit for anything “EarthLink related” and apart from some email addresses on my machine and configuration files which had the words EarthLink in it, I could not find a thing.

I then wondered, had my laptop also been compromised?

After booting it up and opening up my browsers I saw what should be the default “Server Not Found” error page. So it was only my main workstation.

At this point I was fuming as I was trying to figure out all the tools and things I had downloaded over the past few weeks that could have possibly jacked my browsers. I went and disabled every possible thing. Opening and closing both browsers as I removed every little thing but still that EarthLink page kept on coming up for a mistyped domain.

Then, I took a break from it all and in doing so I thought about how I would create a tool that would allow me to hijack a browser without leaving a trace on any person’s machine.

I figured that this could be done a lot of ways but the one that I thought which would be the easiest would be via the ISP. Since my laptop worked and I knew that it was connecting to my wireless router, I figured my desktop must not have been connected to my network.

And as it turned out, my desktop defaulted to the wireless connection and once again it chose my neighbors over mine.

I thought – stupid wireless! My neighbor must be an EarthLink user.

I keep removing his router from my settings but for what ever reason his pops up and my computer loves to connect to it.

Short of the story is, the person doing the hijacking was me. Still this was such a waist of a few hours.

My Blogging has been very light lately but the number of comments I’ve been having to approve have been way up. I had close to 1627 new comments spammed here the past few days with quite a few making their way past my spam filter.

This spam is not your ordinary run of the mill where comments are left randomly. Actually some of this spam almost looks so authentic that I am sure during my bulk deleting there are a few casualties of war. Who ever is hitting my Blog is targeting each post based on keywords and leaving almost topical comments. I would think some of them could pass as real comments except for the fact their URL has anchors such as “pregnant-hardcore”.

I’ve been in hardcore research and development mode these past few months for several large projects.

While in this mode I’ve spent considerable time pounding away at Google and as there are two stages with R&D, research & development, there are two different ways I use Google.

During research mode I strictly only use Google organic search results. I could spend several days to several weeks jumping through Google’s organic search results trying to come-up to speed for a process or solution I am trying to solve. In my quest I could go through dozens of keyword combinations.

You don’t realize how far off Google’s Organic Search Results are and how much work needs to be done with Google’s algorithm until you need to seriously research a method and attempt to bring yourself up-to speed on a variety of areas.

During my research stage I am looking out for several things while clicking away at the organic listings. First of all, are the pages on topic for what I am looking for and secondly are there additional industry terms I am failing to type into Google to refine my research.

This part is key, “Industry Terms”.

Somewhere along the line, it could be a few hours to several weeks, where the information I have been researching suddenly clicks in my brain. Once I have educated myself on the specific topic I have no problem pounding in the industry jargons and pulling on high quality search results.

As it turns out, the majority of sites out on the web still have no clue and use their inside industry terms to describe their products and services. Perhaps this is more of a problem with Google and not those businesses. Reading these sites is as fun as ease dropping on a conversation where people are conversing using nothing but industry acronyms. But, thats where we are still at. The majority of website fail to use basic terms, but those websites offer solid services I might be interested in.

Once I have become a pseudo expert on my researched topic the only websites I want to visit now are those that have a service offering for me. This is where I find value with Google Sponsored Links.

I am currently doing some research on “Managed Email Autoresponders” (See previous post). And when I type in my keywords I see that there are 10 advertisers who have a managed services offering.

At this point, thanks to tabbed browsing I will click on every single one of these ads and open them in separate tabs. Then I will take some time to review each website and narrow down a potential service provider. I could care less that these business spent money advertising and my click cost them because I am now ready to buy and it is comparison shopping time.

I believe my Google search habits represent a lot of users and as someone who advertises products and services via PPC it is important to understand what is happening here.

Users who click on PPC advertisements are probably ready to buy or just need a little priming to click that Buy Now button. Being that as it is a smart PPC campaign should lead a visitor to a page that shows the user only the specific product or service they were looking for and the ability to buy it right then and there.

This may seem like common knowledge but do some searches for some “Managed Service Offerings” and notice how many PPC ads lead the user to the businesses home page.

Hey, I’ve already done my research and I am ready to buy. That’s why clicked on your ad. Take me directly to the product or service I am looking for and tell me how much and show me where I can buy it. Otherwise I will tab over to the 9 other businesses in my browser window and never return.