My insane speaking schedule has made it difficult for me to keep this blog up-to-date, so apologies for that. This year I've spoken at Internet Retailer Web Design, SMX West, Elite Retreat, AMA SEO Training Series, Web 2.0 Expo, Shop.org Marketing Workshop, Catalogue Exchange, eMetrics Summit, and now, in a few days, SMX Advanced.

However, I am going to get back up to a normal posting frequency here quite soon -- especially now that my co-authors and I have finished the draft of The Art of SEO which is coming out later this year (publisher is O'Reilly).

One conference in particular I want to call out as being truly remarkable -- the Elite Retreat, put on by the self-made Internet multimillionaire Jeremy Schoemaker (aka "Shoemoney"). It was an intimate gathering: Jeremy capped the attendance at 35 registrants. Many of the attendees were successful internet millionaires in their own right and were easily qualified to take the stage and offer their own session chock full of content. I felt quite privileged to be amongst them, to learn from them, as well as share some of my expertise and experience with SEO.

Also in attendance was my daughter, Chloe, owner of the Neopets Fanatic blog, who had an amazing time. She learned a lot about affiliate marketing; but even more importantly, she became inspired by the attendees’ successes. One of the first things she did when she got back home was to share her thoughts on the Elite Retreat with readers of the Huffington Post (where she has a column). It was a fitting follow-up to her earlier post about conferences being real-world learning for kids.

The super affiliates really have a secret sauce; it is so much more than hard work. They know the right places to buy traffic. They know the right people to talk to get the best offers and the best payouts. They are able to do deals that the rest of us couldn't hope for.

The sessions covered SEO, paid search, affiliate marketing (of course!), conversion, website acquisitions, and more. Day 2 consisted of one-on-one tactical brainstorming sessions with your top choices of the previous day's speakers (along with some concurrent session presentations). I was busy that whole day giving one-on-ones.

At the end of it (Day 3), we had a field trip to the Facebook headquarters. We got some face time (no pun intended) with some of Facebook employees who were surprisingly giving with information. Unfortunately, NDAs from Facebook and The Elite Retreat prevent me from going into any details whatsoever.

The price tag for the Elite Retreat is steep, it's $5000, but it’s absolutely a worthwhile investment. I heartedly endorse it and think you'll find it to be one of the best conferences you've ever attended. I don’t know if it could rival the TED conference, where you'd get to hobnob with folks like Bill Gates, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. But of course the Elite Retreat is a different kind of conference from that. I am hopeful to attend TED one of these years (it's invitation-only).

I don't know that I'd call the Elite Retreat a conference. It is more of a think tank than a bunch of interesting talking heads. And it's a peer group. The alumni get together over the phone every week to share successes, challenges and questions in what they refer to as the Elite Retreat Mastermind Group.

There's value to be had at traditional conferences as well, of course. Don't stop going to them. But you should also add an event like the Elite Retreat to your conference travel schedule.

I have to say, I am impressed with Wolfram Alpha. I think it's a game changer. It provides a powerful new way of interacting with the large repositories of data available on the Web. For instance, instead of googling for "number of google employees" (incidentally, it isn't until the 4th result down that you get the answer), then googling for "number of yahoo employees", then doing the math to compute the ratio, you would simply input into Wolfram Alpha "google/yahoo employees". (The answer is 1.487:1, if you're curious.)

Welcome to the brave new world of computational engines.

What's a computational engine, you ask? The best definition I can think of is: an online data mining and analysis tool.

What can a computational engine do? A lot. It can segment the population by gender ("u.s. male population, u.s. female population"). It can tell you what that ratio is ("u.s. male population / u.s. female population"). It can graph the growth of the U.S. population over the last several decades ("population u.s."). And it can calculate population density in the U.S. ("population density u.s.").

It's a simple matter to do head-to-head comparisons and generate comparative charts. Just separate the terms with commas. For example, type in "google, yahoo" and you'll get a bunch of charts and graphs comparing the two companies' financials, stock performance and price history.

And wow can you drill down into the data easily. For example, start with the query "google.com" and you'll see all sorts of pertinent facts about the site and the company. To see a report of all the subdomains of google.com, click on the "Subdomains" link. From there you can click on "More subdomains" to get a more exhaustive list:

I just wish I could have typed "subdomains of google.com" or "google.com subdomains" to get to the answer. Neither of those queries works.

Wolfram Alpha can even tell you how long you'll live. I queried "life expectancy age 38 male u.s." and it returned 77.54 years. Then I queried my birthdate and learned that was 38.45 years ago. Then "77.54 - 38.45 years" returned not only 39.09 years, but also 14,268 days -- which feels a lot longer to me! Finally, "39.09 years from now" gives the time and date of my demise: 5:31:06 pm CDT on Thursday June 25, 2048." I'm loading that in my iPhone's calendar with an alarm 10 minutes beforehand, so at least I won't get caught offguard.

I also tried "(77.54 - 38.34) years from now" but Wolfram Alpha choked on that one. However "now + (77.54-38.34) years" did work.

If you're curious which countries have the longest life expectancy (or shortest), type in "life expectancy". Here's the answer:

Perhaps I can buy myself a bit of extra time by moving to Macau? Exactly how much time is anybody's guess. Oh wait, Wolfram Alpha can answer this too!

Not only is the output interesting, the presentation of it is really slick, with great-looking charts and graphs. Note that the charts are rendered as images, not as text. If you want to copy and paste the data within the chart, simply click on it and a "Copyable plaintext" popup box will display.

I find the overly critical comparisons with Google unfair. Remember, Wolfram Alpha is a computational engine, not a search engine. Comparing Wolfram Alpha to Google is like comparing a cell phone to a TV remote. Sure a cell phone and TV remote may both be about the same size and they both have buttons, but the functions they perform are vastly different.

And it's very early days. We need to cut them some slack. Yes it is frustrating to get so many "Wolfram Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input" messages, but when Google debuted in 1997 it was pretty rough too, right?

Watch Stephen Wolfram's screencast demonstration before trying to use the engine. Otherwise it'll frustrate you when you get so many failed queries.

One piece of feedback I would offer to the engineers at Wolfram Alpha is to provide segmentation options to users. In other words, suggest the various ways the requested data can be sliced and diced. For example, the following queries all work properly:

• life expectancy male
• life expectancy age 38
• life expectancy u.s.
• life expectancy u.s. age 38 male
• ldl 100 nonsmoker age 38 male u.s.

but these queries do not:

• life expectancy nonsmoker
• life expectancy ldl 150
• life expectancy wisconsin
• life expectancy wisconsin age 38 ldl 150 male nonsmoker

even though Wolfram Alpha is properly interpreting the syntax of the query and its components ("life expectancy", "male", "age 38", "u.s.", "nonsmoker", "wisconsin", and "ldl 100"). I kept running into trouble when I attempted to further refine the life expectancies from U.S. residents to Wisconsin residents, from males to non-smoking males with slightly high cholesterol levels. Teasing out subgroups within a population could be facilitated by an intuitive visual interface for viewing and selecting from the available segmentation properties. Or by better error messages, like: "Life expectancy data is not available segmented by state, only by country. Please try a broader query, like life expectancy u.s.".

Using Google engineers' terminology will help you look like a search industry insider. For example, talk about "signals" rather than SEO "factors". Describe weak, undifferentiated content as "thin" (as in a "thin affiliate"). Work "canonicalization" into a sentence at least once every 5 minutes. Share your enthusiasm for "shingles" (yeah, NOT the disease). Speak in TLAs (three letter acronyms) like QDD (query deserves diversity) and QDF (query deserves freshness). And so on.

At Google's Searchology conference this month, some new buzzwords were bandied about. Here are a few pulled from this post and this post by Matt Cutts:

• Chameleon = internal Google codename for the algo that does mid-page suggestions (like search for "labor" and get in the middle of the SERPs "See results for labor and delivery")
• Spellmeleon = internal Google codename for the algo that preempts the first natural result with 2 results from what Google believes is the correct spelling of your query (like search for "ipodd" and get "Did you mean: ipod Top 2 results shown"
• Google Squared = a not yet launched Google Labs project that returns search results in a structured format (i.e. as a spreadsheet). Search for "small dogs" and get a matrix with breeds, descriptions, sizes, weights, origins, etc.
• Rich snippets = search listings with addition info in the snippet, such as star rating and number of reviews. Google gets this extra data hReview and hCard microformats - simply put, it's semantic, agreed-upon markup in your HTML pages. Kinda reminiscent of Yahoo's SearchMonkey. More about it here. (Incidentally, Dries - of Drupal fame - has an interesting take on what this could mean for SEO.)

I'm a big fan of the new canonical tag (er, element, to be more technically correct). It's a powerful tool for dealing with duplicate content. But it's not exactly reliable yet. Google wants us use it as if it were. Unquestionably, it's a signal. But it can be ignored, even when it should clearly by obeyed.

Case in point: Northernsafety.com. Many thousands of non-canonical URLs are indexed. For example click on some of the listings on
this SERP and compare the URLs you were led to by Google to what's listed as the canonical URL in the HTML source of these pages. You'll see that the parameters OPC and PFM are present in the URLs in the search listings but are not present in the canonical link element. Hmmm.

I know Google uses the element as a strong hint rather than an absolute directive, however it sounded like from Matt's video that it's about as strong a hint as a 301 redirect. If that were the case, I wouldn't have expected to see this behavior. This example I found doesn't look to me to be an "edge case," and I don't see any reason why Google shouldn't trust or adhere to the canonical tag in this particular situation. So what gives?

If you're thinking that perhaps the canonical tags were just added and didn't have time to kick in yet, take a look at the Cached links on some of those search listings. Some of these pages were cached way back in March and yet still have the canonical tag present in the Cached version. Certainly 2+ months is ample time for Google to canonicalize these pages??

I like canonical tags and I use them. But I always prefer 301 redirects over canonical tags, as 301s are pretty much *always* obeyed.

The lesson here: I wouldn't bet my business on the canonical tag being obeyed by Google.

Although it isn't a primary "signal" like the title tag or anchor text, keywords in your URLs can help with your Google rankings. But ONLY if Google can see the actual words in the URL. Turns out that separating the words in a URL with hyphens allowed Google to see the individual words, but using underscores did not. And this, unfortunately, continues to be the case today.

Not quite two years ago at WordCamp, Matt Cutts made the following statement that Google was imminently going to be treating underscores as word separators:

The interesting thing is we used to treat underscores as if they were like word A underscore word B, we would glom that together and we would index that as A underscore B, so if you just searched for the word A, we wouldn't return your post. Ah... We're in the process of changing that. We might have already changed that. So dashes and underscores are almost exactly the same.

You can hear the above statement for yourself in this video of Matt's talk, at around the 17 minute mark.

I excitedly wrote about it in a post for the News.com Blog, since historically keywords separated by underscores didn't look like separate words to Google, and this would save a lot of folks a lot of time if they were embarking on a URL rewriting project to fix their underscore problem.

Unfortunately I jumped the gun a bit, because Google still has not made the switch to recognizing underscores as word separators like they do with hyphens.

Your next question might be "But are you sure??" Yup. When I spoke to Matt in February at SMX West, he confirmed that underscores were NOT treated as word separators. According to Matt, this change is still in their queue but unlikely to happen before summer. My interpretation: don't hold your breath, it's between summer and never.

Why didn't they roll out that change? Certainly it's clear it's not a priority. Google engineers are focused on improving relevancy and improving the searcher's user experience. I would guess that this particular tweak to their algorithm isn't going to do much for their users.

So, in your URLs, keep favoring hyphens over underscores for the foreseeable future.

And here's one gotcha to be aware of: don't use an underscore to separate a lookup ID from hyphenated keywords. For example, a URL like http://www.example.com/1234_nike-pegasus-running-shoes.html may at first glance appear to be search engine optimal, but the keyword "nike" is not visible to Google as a separate word. The keyword is actually understood by Google to be "1234_nike", not "nike".

By the way, although I favor the hyphen, there are other word separators accepted by Google, such as the dot (.), the plus sign (+), and the "escaped" space character (%20).

In my Search Engine Land column last week, I describe a powerful SEO tactic that we at Netconcepts call "thin slicing". The term originally comes from Malcolm Gladwell (as used in his best seller Blink) and has no origins in the online world.

Gladwell uses the term in the context of "rapid cognition"; where one makes snap judgments in their field of expertise. Surprisingly, those snap judgments are often times more accurate than considered opinion, i.e. assessments that have been labored over. The important caveat: it only holds true for experts, not for amateurs.

We've co-opted the term and applied it to SEO. In that context, thin slicing is a tactic referring to mass optimization across a large number of pages, done quickly, and confined to just one or more high value elements (such as title tags). It relies on the gut-level instinct of the search engine marketer. Spare the in-depth keyword research and analysis and just take a guess, then move on. When you have a daunting number of pages to get through, deciding on synonyms, verb tenses and word order should rely on your intuition. Trying to optimize every element on every page perfectly is not scalable and will only sap your energy. "Thin slicing" could be done on title tags, keyword URLs, H1 headings, or meta descriptions. You'd monitor for impact, and then refine based on those results.

There are two approaches to thin slicing, and which one you use depends very much on your web site's infrastructure and what it supports.

• One is through your a forms-based web interface in your admin. We refer to this as "mass edit" capability. WordPress supports mass editing of title tags and URLs ("post slugs", more accurately) - IF you have our free SEO Title Tag plugin installed. Through its mass edit screen, you can optimize all title tags across your blog - all your posts, category pages, tag pages etc., without having to go to each post's Edit screen individually.

  One feature we found invaluable when using web forms for thin slicing was to make the number of rows displayed per page user-configurable. Some users will want to display hundreds of records per screen, others will want much fewer, as too big of a web page will cause their web browser to crash or time out.

• The other approach is "bulk uploading", where you import an updated list of title tags (or H1s or whatever) into your website's underlying database. You start with a database export in CSV (comma separated values) format of your current title tags -- along with the corresponding item ID numbers for each record, of course. Load the CSV file into Microsoft Excel and do your title tag optimization in the spreadsheet. Then upload the optimized title tags back into the database.

  Note that if your database does not have a field for the title tag, you'll have to create it and re-code your site to override the programmatic title with the contents of this new field when it is populated with data.

  Rather than having to maneuver through phpMyAdmin or rely on your database administrator, have a CSV file upload function built into the admin interface of your content management system (CMS).

When we added the "bulk upload" capability to our GravityStream proxy admin, our optimizers and those at our clients and partner resellers experienced a nice boost in productivity. So we can attest to the fact that "thin slicing" works.

Whether you prefer working in Excel or within a "mass edit" view in your CMS' admin interface, "thin slicing" is a great tactic to add to your SEO toolchest.

New Zealand comparison shopping engine Ferrit is no more. They blew through an incredible amount of money, had their day in the sun, and now they are gone.

I'm sad about that. Not because they were a past client of Netconcepts (back when they had money). But because they were a comparison shopping engine that had a shot at making it - of successfully crossing over into the mainstream. Indeed, much of New Zealand knew of Ferrit, due in large part to the series of funny TV commercials they became known for. Here's one of my favorites, below.

"A book on India"! Haha, umm, not exactly! Oh, and the donkey came from a "completely different website". Classic!

Brand recognition of Ferrit was high among consumers. But yet they weren't moving product.

Is there a lesson to be learned for the global comparison shopping engines? Certainly nothing to be learned by Google for Google Product Search. But for everyone else (Shopzilla, Become, TheFind, etc.), sure. I think the lesson is in how to "cross the chasm" into the mainstream and live to tell the tale.

Ending the week with such a deadly serious post (after all I was talking about your mortality), I thought I'd better lighten the mood a bit. Enjoy...

Roomba robot vacuum? Check.
Cat? Check.
Roomba-riding cat? Doh! I want one of them! (watch the vid)

Maybe I can teach Hazel to ride my Roomba. I'll have to get a new battery for it first. In fact, I'd probably need a pile of replacement batteries. Roomba would go through batteries pretty quick with Hazel atop it!

The China Study has to be the most important book I've ever read. (Yes, even more than Getting Things Done, and many of you long-time readers know I'm a HUGE fan of that book!)

I appreciate good science, especially good biochemistry (after all, I do have a Masters in Biochemistry), and The China Study has it in spades. The book explains in very accessible terms the impact of what we eat on our health and longevity. It's not opinion, it's pure unadulterated science. The book is thoroughly referenced and backed up by sound, peer-reviewed research. In fact it chronicles the largest nutritional scientific research study ever conducted.

If you want to live well and not die prematurely, you MUST read this book.

I can't believe the crap I've been shoving into my body (and I'm even a vegetarian!) -- blissfully ignorant of the true and far-reaching impact. Heck, I might as well have been smoking 4 packs of cigarettes a day!

Reading this book, along with watching the documentary King Corn (which I ordered from Netflix and watched a few weeks ago with two of my 3 kids - the eldest refused to watch it, grrr), really woke me up. As much as I love cheese, crackers, "juice" (which is actually just sugar water, or worse, HFCS-filled water -- as in high fructose corn syrup) and other fast and filling highly-processed food, no more of it! I'm going to undergo a nutritional overhaul, and hopefully I'll get an extra 20 to 40 years out of the effort!

BTW, did you know that just one soda a day DOUBLES your risk of Type II Diabetes (compared to just one soda a month)? Egads! Believe me, you don't want diabetes (my mother has it and it is debilitating). Makes me think twice about the fringe "benefit" of providing all our Netconcepts staff that frig full of free drinks -- most of it sodas.

Change your life. Read this book. </end preaching>

On my first visit to EMC.com last week, I thought to myself "Uh oh, that's not going to be good for their SEO". It was a country selector. The only content on the page was a long list of countries. No keyword-rich copy. No keyword-rich links.

But then I took a deeper look. I did a Google search for "cache:www.emc.com" and was pleased to see the EMC US site's home page, not the Country Selector page! EMC had done their homework on SEO and were detecting the bots and waving them on. Googlebot doesn't have to select a country. Good for you, EMC!

Contrast that approach to Lenovo's global country selector. A Google search for "cache:www.lenovo.com" reveals, um, nothing. Yikes, no home page indexed! Nothing for "cache:lenovo.com" either. Then I visited the site masquerading as Googlebot, using lwp-request (one of my trusty power user command-line tools):

lwp-request -H "User-Agent: Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)" -S lenovo.com

I saw the reason for Lenovo.com not having a home page in Google: bots were being directed to the Country Selector page using the wrong kind of redirect -- a 302 instead of a 301. Not only were bots getting forced through a cookies-based country selector (mistake #1) made worse by the issue of the 302 (mistake #2), but also the URLs are not being canonicalized (i.e. there was no www present in the URL "http://lenovo.com/planetwide/select/selector.htm". Indeed, none of the site is canonicalized. "http://lenovo.com/us/en/index.html" should 301 to "http://www.lenovo.com/us/en/index.html". Or vice versa if you prefer your site's URLs sans www.

What would I do differently if I were the sysadmin at Lenovo? I'd detect for Googlebot and send Googlebot directly to the U.S. site via a 301 redirect. Or alternatively, I'd make the home page URL ("http://www.lenovo.com/") respond with the country selector for humans and the US home page for bots without doing a redirect at all. That would mean the US home page would live at "/" (rather than "/us/en/index.html") for everyone except for humans who have no cookie set with their country preference, and of course, crawlers. Those visitors to / with the cookie set to another country would get redirected to the previously chosen country, which would not live on lenovo.com but on the corresponding country code TLD (such as lenovo.co.uk, lenovo.fr, lenovo.com.au). And I'd 301 non-www URLs to their www counterparts (more on this here).