Sweetness… Google seems to have added the name ShandyKing to their “Do You Mean” suggestive search feature.

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!

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.

Can anyone recommend any good managed service providers who handle email auto response, scheduled newsletters, electronic product downloads, email list management and tracking?

I just upgraded my FireFox Extension, Search Status, to 1.19 and now I have something called “Compete Rank”.

Take a look at what Compete Rank has for Google. It shows that Google has a Compete Rank of 10,788.

And that number means???

Today I received a big stuffed envelope in the mail with all sorts of Azoogle gear! That is really cool of them especially since I think they spent more on mail costs then I probably made for them being an affiliate of theirs.

While running around the halls of AdTech San Francisco the other week I met a few of their crew in person and they are all seemed like a great group of people. I’ve been told several times now that their BlockBuster campaigns have been working real well for their affiliates.

Thanks again Azoogle for the personal delivery of SWAG!!