I must credit my friend Prashant Karandikar tipping me off to an intriguing post entitled “Many SEO Experts Give Wrong Advice Regarding Wordpress Permalinks” by Weberz-Rob. That’s a great linkbait title if you ever saw one, particularly when he began naming these well-known SEOs who gave this “bad advice”, such as:

• Matt Cutts
• Joost de Valk
• Michael Gray
• Aaron Wall

For good measure, he also listed other well-known SEOs who weren’t giving this “bad” WordPress permalink advice but had “bad” URLs, e.g.

• Danny Sullivan
• Stephan Spencer
• Vanessa Fox

So how does this unknown (to me) person presume to give advice to the A-list of SEOs? Read his post for the details, but he has WordPress Codex on his side. It says:

For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text “page slug” as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties). So, it is best to start your permalink structure with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID.

The permalink structure of this blog used to be:

/%category%/%postname%-%post_id%.html

So, this was not the optimum URL structure according to the WP Codex, as the code would waste time evaluating whether a URL is a post or a page. Now this blog is not heavily visited enough for me to care about fractions of a second, but I like to use best practices. I have opted not for the advice of Weberz-Rob or the WP Codex, but the following:

/%postname%-%post_id%.html

I agree with Andy Beard’s comments in that post and have also settled on the filename ending in .html because I’d like an easy .htaccess solution for my indexed pages that would otherwise lead to 404s. Removing the %category% from the URL was easy.

Revised .htaccess

This is what my .htaccess file looks like:

Options +FollowSymLinks -Indexes
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 RewriteEngine On
 RewriteRule ^[^/]+/([^/]+)\.html$ http://www.netmagellan.com/$1.html [NC,R=301,L]
 # BEGIN WordPress
 RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
 RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
 RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
 # END WordPress
</IfModule>

Microsoft and Amazon have announced cheap pricing for Windows 7 Pre-Orders placed before July 11. The Upgrade price for Windows 7 Home Premium is US$49.99. The pricing at Amazon is as follows:

• Home Premium = $49.99 Upg; $199.99 Full
• Pro = $99.99 Upg; $299.99 Full
• Ultimate = $219.99 Upg; $319.99 Full

Click here or the button on the right to go to Amazon.

Watch this video of my friend Brandon LeBlanc interviewing Brad Brooks, Corporate VP for Windows Consumer about this release (It would not embed properly in WordPress):

Announcing the Windows 7 Upgrade Option Program & Windows 7 Pricing

(Transcript here.)

I prefer to use a product for a while before writing a review — my Brother MFC-235C is over six months old, but it’s still on the store shelves. As it wasn’t supplied by Brother PR but paid for from my own pocket, I was in no hurry to write it up.

My previous printer was an HP OfficeJet that was bought in 2000 and it was showing no signs of dying. However, it was incompatible with Windows Vista and therefore would be unusable with Windows 7, which I hope to use. Its third cartridge in nine years (I am a light printer user at home) was about to run out and would probably cost more than a new inkjet. When I bought my new desktop PC, I realised that one doesn’t get a printer port anymore unless you specify it as an add-on card. That was enough for me to rush back to the mall and buy a Brother this time.

Why Brother? I had bought my wife a cheap Brother HL-2040 laser printer last year to go with her Vista notebook and was comfortable with its performance to break my 20-year “habit” of buying only HP scanners and printers. That printer is now in the kids’ study while my wife has an HP inkjet which I might review some day.

Brother MFC-235C

The multi-function centre (MFC) has six main functions:

• Colour inkjet printer
• Colour copier
• B&W fax send/receive
• PC fax
• Scanner
• Pictbridge camera printing

In Use

Setting up the device was the usual procedure – get rid of the packaging, load the starter ink cartridges, then install the software before connecting your PC to the device. I liked one feature – being able to set the fax to manual, so that I didn’t accept spam faxes. I keep forgetting to set it, so I get one or two each month.

The printer takes four individual colour cartridges – Black LC37BK, Yellow LC37Y, Cyan LC37C, and Magenta LC37M – a welcome change from some of my earlier HP printers where running out of a single colour caused you to replace the single colour cartridge.

The software is MFL-Pro Suite. You can optionally install scanning and OCR software for either Windows 2000/XP/Vista or Macintosh OSX 10.2.4 or higher. The scanner resolution is only 600×2400 dpi, so don’t plan on archiving your family photos with this feature. (Other Brother models have better scanning resolution).

You can add an external answering machine or a telephone. This means you only need one telephone socket at the wall; one wire from this socket to the device and one more wire to the telephone. The LCD panel and buttons enable you to customise the device.

This is not the time to discover (as I did) that the device does not come with a USB cable – typical these days. I borrowed one from the family and it took them days to figure out why they could not print.

So how does it perform? Not much to say, in fact – it just works. Clean printouts, acceptable scans, good fax send/receive. No paper jams so far. I’m quite happy to recommend it.

Details: http://tr.im/mfc235c

If you have a non-business fax machine, as I do, you may get unwanted spam faxes from businesses who use UTBox, which is based in Sydney. UTBox has a “fax opt-out facility” which is after the fact, i.e. you can “opt out” after you have received the unwanted fax. The press release says:

To make it easier for those marketers who wish to utilise an online fax broadcast opt-out mechanism we have introduced dontfax.me. dontfax.me is a website where receivers of un-wanted faxes can register their wish to opt-out.

This is not accurate. If you go to http://dontfax.me, you get this unhelpful screen:

Enter the URL? Isn’t this where one can opt out?

I have no idea if there was an intention to provide an opt-out form there, but the source code of the home page is bewildering. Yes, there is nothing else in the code than what you see below:

<table cellpadding=10 border=0>
<tr>
 	<td>
		<img src=/images/logo.jpg>
	</td>
	<td>
			Please enter the URL with the company name included
	</td>
	</tr>
<!--
<tr>
	<td colspan=2>
		Tired of wasting paper with your fax machine? Try an <a href="http://www.utbox.net/fax_by_email/">internet fax solution</a> so that your faxes come directly into your email.
	</td>
</tr>
!-->
</table>

So far I have received unwanted faxes from the following companies. If you want to avoid getting faxes from them, use the URL next to them to supply your fax number:

• Global Rags – Melbourne = http://dontfax.me/richmond.com ; Canberra/Fyshwick =  http://dontfax.me/globalrags
• Wine Growers Direct – Melbourne = http://dontfax.me/wine ;

If you know of other opt-out URLs, please add them as comments.

Contact the Advertisers

Here are some contact points for the advertisers in case you want to get in touch:

• Global Rags, Richmond VIC 3121 = Phone: 03 9528 3100. Fyshwick = Phone: 02 6248 6011. (and numerous other outlets in Australia)
• Wine Growers Direct, Port Melbourne VIC = Phone 1800 635 331

I like Lisa Barone’s writings. I even followed her on Twitter until she started tweeting about the RedSox. Unfollow

I’m disappointed I didn’t go to SMX Advanced, where a few major announcements were made and where Matt Cutts apparently was “openly stating that Google profiles SEOs like common criminals.”

• http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/google-profiles-seo-as-criminals/

At this point you should read Lisa’s post and all the comments below. With a headline like that, I certainly took notice. It would seem that well-known SEOs are on Matt’s personal radar for special treatment.  She cites Michael Gray, better known as graywolf.

During a lunch conversation and follow up email conversation with Matt, Michael received some advice on things to change on Viral Conversation to help them “match” what Google suggests. One “recommendation” obviously being hinted at was to make sure bloggers used a nofollow on all links to rid any sense of paid link impropriety. In session, Michael asked why he had to place a nofollow when he gets free links but Google does not.That’s when Matt started talking about SEOs as being “high risk” and “people who do things deliberately for links”.
Fact: Viral Conversations faced more scrutiny because Michael is an SEO. Michael and his sites are profiled the same way a black kid is when he’s out too late and the convenience store on the corner gets robbed. Make no mistake, the way Google handles your site is both site-specific and SEO-specific. And they do hold grudges.

See also an older post by Michael:

• How Google Profiles SEOs

He wrote:

Why does this matter, I run a website ViralConversations.com the purpose of the website is to put free gifts in the hands of bloggers, the exact same way Google did with the android phone, yet I have had to modify my FAQ to tell all bloggers to use nofollow on all links or risk a google penalty, while Google gets to corrupt cell phone searches with impunity.

How does this show that Google is profiling SEO’s and not the rest of the blogging world? How else can you explain high profile A-List bloggers like Robert Scoble and Sarah Lacy accepting free all expense paid trips to Isreal and not getting penalized? How can Guy Kawasaki get “loaned” one, two, three cars in three years and still be within Google’s guidelines .

What’s my take on all these examples? I learnt a new, apt expression from one of the comments – “conference circuit SEOs” – which sounds more like a liability than an asset. I have only been to Webmasterworld conferences, so I have not met some of these conference circuit SEOs. Matt Cutts wouldn’t give me his email address when I asked him a couple of years ago, so I guess he isn’t going to write to me anytime soon.

I don’t have any hard-core affiliate marketing websites, other than a handful that have survived the Google algo pogroms of the past five years. I don’t covet PR and I have never bought a link. I don’t sell links. I certainly review products here and link to the vendors, but I have written reviews for over 20 years and am not changing anything. I doubt if Matt will ever visit my sites, let alone tell me what to change.

There’s no denying that some SEOs do test the envelope and are bound to attract attention. If I were Matt I would be tempted to look at the sites of expert SEOs a little closer if only to see what tricks were being used to bypass the algo. I sometimes check the customer sites of SEO companies to discover where they get their backlinks, but if I were Matt, why would I not hand-edit a site if it was misbehaving? He often uses the word “intent” to refer to activity that attracts a penalty.

As for the well-known tech review sites and A-List bloggers, they have a large enough audience to not need SEO or even Google traffic for survival. Their intent could be simply commercial quid pro quo, which is nobody else’s business.

What’s your view? Please comment.

By now you might be aware of name-checking services such as Knowem, or User Name Check, which will check whether your username/tag/brand has been taken at 120 or more sites. They can also, for a fee, register your tag/brand at those sites.

But have you considered the URL shortening sites that have become popular owing to Twitter? Have you checked your brand name there to see where it leads? Try the following (at your risk):

• http://tr.im/coke (about cocaine tootache drops)
• http://tr.im/ibm (News8 TV, Austin)
• http://tr.im/google (some dark Cyrillic page)
• http://tr.im/telstra (The Australian newspaper)
• http://tr.im/gm (Huffington Post article about mayors)
• http://tr.im/obama (K12 school video about Obama)
• http://tr.im/jeep (specific forum post about a Jeep)

Companies that have grabbed their brand include:

• http://tr.im/nike
• http://tr.im/optus
• http://tr.im/oracle (kind of, points to Sun URL!)
• http://tr.im/chrysler

So the message is clear. Go to all the URL shortening services and grab your brand name, even if it is very long. Point it to your home page or some permanent URL. I mentioned tr.im partly because it displays click stats for your URLs (hence worth getting a free account) and partly because it seems to have a few brand names available while the older URL-shortening sites don’t.

You can also grab keywords (don’t bother looking for “seo”) relevant to your business or your resume. I grabbed some for my resume, hoping I won’t need them in a hurry:

• http://tr.im/seocv
• http://bit.ly/seocv
• http://tinyurl.com/seocv
• http://snipurl.com/seocv

Some of these sites give you usage stats:

• bit.ly
• tr.im
• snipurl.com
• tinyurl.com

I didn’t list the sites that don’t offer an alias option. Is.gd has a workaround – you place a slash at the end of the short URL followed by your label, but it’s not pretty or memorable. Example:

• http://is.gd/MR3D/yellowpages