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>

You may have already seen my article on Search Engine Land "Making Sense of Google’s New Dynamic URL Recommendations", but if you haven't, I'll recap some key points about Google's new recommendations on dynamic URLs and URL rewriting and why I don't advise you follow these recommendations.

As much as I'd love to believe that Google no longer needs webmasters to clean up their URLs for Googlebot, the hard truth of the matter is that Googlebot STILL stumbles across the same content at varying URLs and mistakenly indexes all copies -- even returning one version of these URLs with some queries and other versions with other queries. In fact that's the whole premise of my colleague Brian Klais' Search Engine Land article from earlier this month, that guided navigation systems create numerous URL pathways to the same content, and Googlebot isn't very good at detecting this and compensating for the duplication and PageRank dilution effects. What it all boils down to is this: what's confusing for Googlebot ultimately becomes confusing for searchers, thus leading to a lose-lose-lose -- for Google, for its users, and for you the site owner.

Given this, I dispute the assertion in the aforementioned post from the Google Webmaster Central Blog, that webmasters should "feel free to serve us [Google] your standard dynamic URL and we will automatically find the parameters which are unnecessary." That's gambling with your rankings, and personally I don't like the odds.

Let's have a look at a concrete example to prove my point. Just last month I spoke at the Shop.org Annual Summit, on a site clinic session where I gave impromptu critiques of sites volunteered by audience members. One such site was MEC.ca. A great site for users, not so great for Googlebot. It didn't take long for me to spot the duplicate content and PageRank dilution issues. Digging through site:www.mec.ca results revealed pages with jsessionid and bmUID parameters. Indeed, 102000 results (estimated) for and 96400 results (estimated) for site:www.mec.ca inurl:jsessionid!

Let's focus in on a specific page of MEC.ca: the "Biodegradable Shopping Bag" page, of which there are 15 copies in Google's index. Clearly Googlebot is confused.

This confusion is further evidenced by the fact that a search on "biodegradable shopping bag" returns a different mec.ca URL (on page 1) than a search on "biodegradable shopping bags" (page 4 of the SERPs) -- yet they are both the same (duplicate) page of content.

I would counsel MEC.ca that maintaining status quo and leaving things in the hands of Googlebot to eventually (maybe) sort out is not a viable solution.

Let's review some pertinent facts about dynamic URLs, along with my evidence:

FACT: URLs with session IDs or user IDs don't always get properly identified by Google, resulting in duplicate content and PageRank dilution.

EVIDENCE: The above-mentioned example from mec.ca.

FACT: URLs with keywords in them rank better in the SERPs than those with product IDs. So a rewritten URL like www.domain.com/blue-widgets will outperform www.domain.com/product.asp?productID=123 for a search on "blue widgets" -- all else being equal. This is true not just in Google, but in other engines as well.

EVIDENCE: We've conducted numerous experiments for clients to prove the rankings benefit to ourselves, but we can't publish these tests unfortunately (we are restricted due to client confidentiality). I encourage you to conduct your own tests. A Microsoft engineer just last month confirmed that keyword URLs provide a boost in Live Search.

FACT: Short URLs have a better clickthrough rate in Google SERPs than long URLs.

EVIDENCE: This effect was found through user testing that was commissioned by MarketingSherpa. MarketingSherpa found that short URLs get clicked on twice as often as long URLs (given that the position rank is equal).

FACT: Keyword URLs are more user-friendly, and thus probably better at enticing clicks in the SERPs by searchers.

EVIDENCE: Keywords within a URL that match the search query are bolded, providing additional emphasis to the search listing.

So, given the above facts, would you rewrite your complex dynamic URLs to look static and keyword-rich? I sure would!

Then what are Googlers' Juliane Stiller and Kaspar Szymanski trying to accomplish with the aforementioned blog post? My hunch is that Google is finding an alarmingly large number of improperly implemented URL rewrites that are confusing Googlebot even more and exacerbating the duplicate content situation. If superfluous parameters -- e.g. session IDs, user IDs, flags that don't substantially affect the content displayed, tracking parameters -- get mistakenly embedded into the filename/filepath, then Googlebot will have an even harder time identifying those superfluous parameters and aggregating the duplicates. And what if parameters are embedded in the filepath in inconsistent order (e.g. www. example.com/c-clothing/shirts-mens/ and www.example.com/shirts-mens/c-clothing/)? That's another nightmare scenario for Googlebot. On top of all that, when Googlebot still finds links to the old (non-rewritten) URLs, your well-intentioned URL rewriting actually presents Google with yet another duplicate to deal with. It can be a real mess. The lesson here is to hire a professional when embarking on a URL rewriting project, NOT to leave your URLs dynamic and your website in the hands of fate.

Ever see someone and think "Geez, that person looks totally different from how I remember him/her"? I just saw MC Hammer at the Ypulse conference last month and thought that. In fact, I didn't even recognize him until he was introduced. Here's a picture I snapped of him in the hallway after his session finished. Compare that with the photo juxtaposed (taken from the "U Can't Touch This" video) in his "Hammertime" heyday, in the early 90's (gotta love those parachute pants!).

One of my staff was shocked practically out of his seat when he stumbled across an old photo of me on the About Us page of audit-it.com. Oh wow do I look different now. Compare a picture of me now with that one from 10 years ago:

Ha!

Yesterday I got an email from a relative, one of those joke emails that get forwarded around. If you could imagine what a few years and more than a few pounds could do to Michelangelo's David, it might look like this:

Being a parent, sometimes the going gets rough. Particularly when you're dealing with teenagers. Ya know what I'm talking about? Parenting experts don't call it the White Water Rafting Years for nothing. Last week was one of those weeks from Hell. *sigh* Hopefully it isn't anything that a little "tough love" won't fix though. Of course she is grounded. But a new and very warranted punishment was I confiscated her cell phone -- permanently. If she wants a cell phone, she'll have to buy one herself, and sign up for service herself, in her own name. She went ballistic on that one.

Anyways, I thought you'd enjoy seeing a couple of funny signs about children...

A sign spotted in China

A sign spotted in Madison, WI

Does this sound familiar?... No matter how well you plan your day, the day seems to get away from you and at the end of it you never seem to finish all of the tasks you anticipated finishing? This is the story of my life! It feels out of control. Thankfully there's a way out - it's called "GTD" (Getting Things Done), a time management, or more appropriately, life management methodology developed by best-selling author David Allen. This methodology is outlined in great detail in Getting Things Done, which is one of my all-time favorite business books.

Recently I had the distinct pleasure of sitting down with David Allen for a fascinating discussion. I asked him for solutions to the problems that still plagued me, despite being an enthusiastic student of GTD (I've written about GTD on multiple occasions).

David gives some some excellent answers on how to...

• eliminate time-stealing distractions,
• how avoidance affects success,
• how crisis negatively impacts your ability to think intelligently,
• how sometimes waiting until the last minute is the best way to get things done,
• the importance of emptying your email inbox,
• the usefulness of virtual assistants,
• and how the biggest barrier to self-expression and self-actualization is our own selves.

"You can't manage time," David said. "You actually only manage what you do during time. So the management issue is not so much about time, it's more about how you manage your focus, how you manage your actions and your activities in terms of what you do. That's one of the problems with that whole field of time management -- they mislabel the problem. Because they label the problem as time, everyone thinks that the calendar is going to be your solution, and it isn't."

In a deadline-driven, time-sensitive, stress-filled world, having the right strategies to deal with your myriad of responsibilities is essential to avoiding burnout and remaining permanently productive. With some elements of your professional life, David's advice is simple to apply, such as merely paying attention to what has your attention. With other things, you may find yourself facing off against tightly-held, self-destructive habits and behaviors that will prove difficult to disown.

Check out the podcast audio MP3 and read my article about the interview published this week on MarketingProfs.com.

Last night I went to a free screening at Sundance Cinemas for "Big Ideas for a Small Planet," a new series on the Sundance Channel (and also available via iTunes). They treated us all to free popcorn and drinks, and they brought in some folks for a Q&A afterwards who were involved in sustainable interior decorating and river clean-up (the major topics covered in the two episodes they screened). It was really nice.

Just when I start feeling good, thinking the human race could be ready to turn the corner, I see these two items making the rounds in the twitterverse:

Lower Back Tattoos Now Available at Toys R Us

Part of the Problem

In some ways, we're heading backwards not forwards. Ugh. We've got a loooong ways to go.

I've always been intrigued by robots. The concept of a robot vacuuming your living room seems so enticing. Indeed, I own a Roomba vac and I love it! But these robots designed for the battlefield are enough to put the fear of God into any robot-loving geek:

Our tax dollars at work. Scary as hell!

I've been battling a hacker on this blog for the past two weeks. Perhaps you noticed the pharma spam redirects that just wouldn't go away, despite reinstalling WordPress, moving servers, switching to a default theme, removing all plugins, locking down the admin with HTTP authentication, changing ownership and permissions on all files, etc. etc. Just to clarify it's not just me doing the battling, I have had TONS of help from a couple of Netconcepts' finest sysadmins (a big shout-out to Dave and Drew for the late nights!). It occurred tonight to Dave that this attack might be personal, because the hacker was vehemently expending so much effort to break back in and cause havoc each time that a hole was closed. But what did I do to deserve such violence? And to also target the blogs of my three children and of my Netconcepts colleague Chris Smith is really sick.

A helpful visitor emailed me a couple hours ago a screenshot of a popup window with a ransom note of sorts. Apparently the hacker heard me present at PubCon on December 5th and didn't like me and/or what I had to say. The message was clear: either the hacker says his piece on this blog or the attacks will continue full-force. Here's the screenshot:

That's pathetic -- resorting to a criminal act against me instead of simply engaging me in a dialogue through commenting or emailing me. I'm happy to take constructive criticism. But Mr. Lawless Hacker: don't threaten me, don't try to intimidate me, don't steal from me, don't vandalize my sites, and don't harm my family or my colleagues in the process. Okay, so you want to take me to task for something, so be it. Do it in the comments.

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to thank everyone for staying tuned to my blog. Lately, I've been very focused on blogging and writing articles. I'd like to make up for lost time by writing a series of posts that will cover many of the topics I've been addressing on places like CNet: Searchlight, Business Blog Consulting, Practical eCommerce, Marketing Profs, and Search Engine Land.

Thanks again for staying with me, I appreciate your support.