Recently I made the following tweet:

My gripe seemed to resonate with some of my followers, who retweeted and responded, sharing similar sentiments and lamenting about people who hit them up for favors. I’m getting a bit tired of the “Scumbag Steve” people who only get in touch with me when they need something. Last time I checked, something that does that isn’t considered a friend, it’s defined as a parasite.

He doesn't even offer up a "Thanks, brah," either.

I’m sure you’re all too familiar with the drill: you receive an email out of the blue from a family member, acquaintance, old high school buddy, or a distant colleague whom you’ve met once at a conference four years ago. The ballsier emails cut to the chase — no half-ass pleasantries here, they need your expertise and they can’t be bothered with a polite “Hello, how’ve you been?” The subject line is a curt “Can you help me out with something” or “Take a look at this real quick for me,” falsely insinuating that the thing they want help with is something so quick and simple that you’ll barely need to spend five minutes on it, so why wouldn’t you throw your buddy a bone?

You scan the email. All your “friend” wants is an in-depth site audit, a free copy of your book, your consulting services on the house, step-by-step guidelines for how to build a robust website that will be wildly successful, or free access to tools or code that you spent weeks or months perfecting. That’s it. Surely you can spare that for an old pal, right?

Usually I relent, feeling obligated because the person in need is a family member or an old friend. So I spend a half hour or more doing research on his or her behalf, offering up my advice in a nicely formatted email or, even better, a well organized word document. I fire off my reply and wait for a courtesy “Thanks so much! This is really helpful and I greatly appreciate it. We should get together sometime and catch up so I don’t seem like I only contact you when I need something from you!” response.

The bad parasites counter back with a simple and curt “Thanks,” while the worst offenders don’t even respond at all, because they’ve gotten what they wanted from you and can’t be bothered to act like a decent human being and show an iota of gratitude. Scumbag Steve returns to his cave to hibernate for another several months before rearing his sleepy, ungrateful head to hit you up once again for free advice.

I’ve given site audits to people who never responded, not even with a half-ass “thank you.” I’ve provided folks with references to my friends when asked if I know any good developers, designers, consultants, etc. for a specific project, tell my friends to expect to be contacted for potential work, and apologize to my friends when they’re never contacted.  I’ve given advice to someone who asked me if there are any sites out there “like YouTube” and “Could I build a site that’s like YouTube but maybe 1/5th the traffic” and “Wait, how could hosting a YouTube-like video site cost that much money, that makes no sense,” and had this same person argue that “anyone who knows anything about Photoshop knows that Obama’s birth certificate is fake.” Bitch, you’re dumb enough to think a YouTube clone would be cheap to host but expect me to believe you’re some grand Photoshop wizard? I don’t think so.

Guess what? I’m tired of being used and abused, and I’m sure you are too. There’s a difference between asking someone for help and expecting it. Just because we are friends, colleagues, or family doesn’t mean I am obligated to help you. Yes, I know that I do “Internet stuff.” I know we sat next to each other in 9th grade Geometry. I know that I’m your sister and you drove me to the movies before I had my driver’s license. But I’m also a human being. I’m not some vending machine that shits out advice every time you feed me a quarter (and I don’t even get a quarter!). My purpose in life is not to sit in front of my computer waiting for you to email me for help so I can spring onto my keyboard and eagerly comply, like a doting dog waiting at the front door for its master to come home and pat me on the head.

You want my help? Here’s how you get it:

1. You interact with me outside of your requests. None of this Halley’s Comet “one email every year” bullshit — you want my help, you’re gonna have to put in the time. Some sort of interaction, whether it’s the occasional “How’re ya doing” email, a tweet thrown my way, hell, even a “like” on my Facebook status will show me that you’re someone who’s at least feigning a relationship, however superficial it may be. You don’t actually need to know magic, you just need to fool your audience.
2. You scratch my back. Be available for help in return. If this relationship is a one-way street, pretty soon the more useful party will go “Wait a minute, I think I’m getting a raw deal here” and realize that you’re not pulling your weight. Offer up something you’re good at. If Internet marketing or coding ain’t your thing, throw a gift card, a baked good, or a hot meal your friend’s way. If your buddy feels appreciated, he’s more likely to help you again in the future.
3. You’re a decent human being. The simplest rule of all that everyone seems to forget. What happened to “please” and “thank you”? A simple follow up is common courtesy. “Hey, thanks for the referrals. They didn’t end up fitting with what I was looking for, but I really appreciate you sending those contacts my way!” “Thanks for the advice! Take a look at some of the changes I implemented after going through your notes — they really improved the look and feel, so thanks again.” And so on. Would it kill you to show some gratitude? I’m tired of a society that’s become too selfish, too egotistical, too greedy. You’re not entitled to anything; you earn that shit and you thank the people who helped get you there.

If you’re still confused, it all boils down to simple rules you learned in kindergarten: be nice, say “please” and “thank you,” and share. If you can’t even do those three little things, you’re a selfish asshole who doesn’t deserve help. If you can, then I will gladly offer you some assistance. It’s what friends are for, right?

January is almost here and the holidays are mostly behind us (minus one last drunken evening where you surround yourself with Woo Girls and toast the last year before the Mayans go apocalyptic on our asses), which means that you only have a few precious days left to enjoy Lexus’s “December to Remember” Sales Event commercials. You may already be familiar with them: they’re basically a series of commercials advertising Lexus cars. The website even urges you to “give that special someone the gift they’ve always deserved, and make this December one to remember.”

What cracks me up about this promotion isn’t the idea of giving someone a car for Christmas (an act of generosity I won’t be able to pull off until the startup I work for starts making mad dolla dolla bills y’all), it’s the fact that the commercials each center on the idea that everybody can immediately recognize Lexus’s self-appointed “You’re getting a Lexus, bitches!” jingle and creams their pants when they hear it.

Here are a few of the Lexus ads in case you haven’t seen them:

“Hey, this elevator music sounds a lot like the Lexus jing–waaaaait a minute…”

I like how the song was put together by the username “Dad of the Year”–how modest.

The Lexus YouTube account is trying to make this song a “thing” to the point where they state on each video, “When you hear that song, you know it’s time for the Lexus December to Remember Sales Event.” I can only deduce that they hire trucks to drive through affluent neighborhoods and pump that jingle out like some sort of One Percenter Ice Cream Man to get rich people to develop a Pavlovian reaction once they hear it.

Truck speakers: “Dum dum dum dum da da bum bum bum bahhhhhhhh…..”

Rich Ol’ Moneybags: “Hmm, I really need a new Lexus for some reason…”

Of course, big brands and catchy jingles are nothing new. Everyone’s familiar with McDonald’s “Ba da ba bah bahhhhh” I’m Lovin’ It tune, and many of us have heard a borderline hysterical woman screeching on the radio “That’s JA-REDDDDD!!! IT CAN ONLY BE JAAAAAAREDDDDDD!” to promote Jared Jewelers. But something about Lexus trying super hard to force this jingle down our throats and make it seem as if everyone knows it by heart seems a little “Are you fucking kidding me,” at least to this middle class girl. They’re the Gretchen Weiner of luxury car ads–”Stop trying to make these jingles happen, Lexus! They’re not going to happen!”

I know, Gretchen. I know.

Then again, perhaps the point is to make the commercials so incredibly cheesy that snarky poor folk like myself make fun of them and inadvertently get the song stuck in their head, which is exactly what happened to me throughout an hour fifteen minute-long run. By the time I was done, I wanted to either kill myself or trade in my Subaru for a Lexus, I couldn’t decide which. Or maybe Lexus is trying the “Gabbo” approach to marketing, in which they hype up something that nobody knows about but gets excited for nonetheless. “You’re not familiar with the Lexus jingle? Well, of course you wouldn’t know it, you Camry-driving commoner! I shall laugh at your ignorance while polishing my monocle! “

"Your welfare ears couldn't possibly handle the sublime sound of the Lexus jingle!"

The commercials are cheesy, sure, but you often get that type of marketing around the holidays. The real question is whether or not these ads are effective. At first I thought no because of how ludicrous the forced jingles are, but the more I thought about it, the more I accepted Lexus’s “Emperor’s New Clothes” marketing tactic. Poor people are probably thinking “WTF is up with this jingle, I’ve never heard it before. Is this a rich person thing, like a ‘wealthy folk only’ song?”, while rich people are all “Wait, I’m rich. Should I recognize this song? …uh, ‘cuz if so, I totally do. It’s the Lexus song! The one we rich people know…I’m gonna buy a Lexus, that’s how well I know this song.”

So in this marketing case study, Lexus tried to make “fetch” happen and maybe it worked. Then again, maybe it didn’t, but either way, it was intriguing enough for me to make fun of it in a blog post, so at least it got people talking (the ol’ “There’s no such thing as bad press” tactic). As you ponder how you feel about the “December to Remember” ads, keep in mind that if you like them, there are only a few days left to buy yourself a fancy new car, and if you hate them, there are only a few days left before you don’t have to put up with attractive Burberry-wrapped couples squealing with delight when they see their new luxury sedan adorned with a ridiculously gigantic bow. As for me, I’ve got to take my Impreza in to get the “check engine” light dealt with and hope for the best…

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been learning quite a bit about nginx. Most of AuthorityLabs has been running on nginx, with the most notable exception being the part of our site running on WordPress. I’ve been a long time fan of having a LAMP stack and when we migrated the site to AWS earlier this year, that’s what I wanted set up.

While Apache is a great server, I’ve come to realize that it can be bloated and many times it ends up costing time and money to work around the bloat and quirks. As Chris Lea put it, “Apache is like Microsoft Word; it has a million options but you only need six. Nginx does those six things, and it does five of them 50 times faster than Apache.” A lot of people don’t NEED Microsoft Word, just like they don’t NEED Apache.

As of October 2011, nginx is serving up 11.28% of sites. Not a staggering figure by any means, but for something that had its first stable release a few months ago, that’s pretty good. They also recently received $3 million in funding. It should be interesting to see how that works out. Considering their growth, funding, and the fact that nginx is powering some high profile sites such as Facebook, Zappos, Groupon, and WordPress.com, it shouldn’t be long before a lot of people take notice and start making the move.

Why should you care?

Nginx is fast. Performance testing nginx vs. Apache with AuthorityLabs showed that for our simple WordPress installation, page loads and response times were cut in half. I’ll admit that I’m not the best at tuning Apache and we may have been able to speed it up a bit, but I spent almost no time customizing the configuration of nginx and it just worked.

Nginx is flexible. With Apache, if you have something like PHP installed, every site running on that install of Apache would be running PHP. There are cases where that is definitely not ideal. Nginx allows the ability to specify what languages and options are available on a site by site basis. That means you could run WordPress and a Rails app on different sites running off the same nginx install and not end up with conflicts or added overhead.

Nginx is growing. Apache has been around a long time and it seems like it has become pretty stale. There’s not a lot of new innovation and it’s rare to see cool new tricks. With nginx, there are cool new ideas coming out all the time. Whether it’s microcaching, json hacks, and a cool tool for porting Apache .htaccess rules to nginx.

Do you really need to make the switch?

This really depends on your needs and knowledge. Many people are going to be fine sticking with their shared hosting, vps, or managed dedicated servers where options may be limited and they can only run Apache. If you’re concerned about performance and speed, nginx is definitely worth considering. There is a learning curve, but it’s not bad. There are plenty of tutorials out there to help get you going. For me, if I could move everything I have to nginx right now, I would. The main hold up on that is time and the ability to get a lot of vastly different IP addresses to get rid of footprints

Ready to make the switch to nginx?

We’re working on some pretty cool tools and information that will get you going with nginx at a very reasonable price. Keep an eye out on our blog over the next few weeks and we will be spewing all kinds of sweet information about getting set up, configuring, and running nginx.

A friend of mine is engaged, and I am to be one of her bridesmaids. As a four-time bridesmaid, I’ve unfortunately been to more wedding blogs and bridal shop websites than a sane human should. Some are fantastic, doing everything SEOs recommend: engaging and well-written content, a solid back link profile, good information architecture, attractive designs and clean code. And as with any industry, a large number are poorly designed and built, and even more poorly optimized.

Recently, my friend and I were going wedding dress shopping, and she sent me to the website of the bridal store she’d chosen. I was slightly horrified.

I’d like to say this was one of the worst wedding sites I’ve seen, but the errors they were making are quite common to sites across sites in all niches. From keyword stuffed content pages, to duplicate content, and spammy back links, this shop was doing nearly everything SEOs consider to be wrong.

Whether this hurts organic traffic, of course, depends on the niche. The wedding industry is pretty cut-throat, and unfortunately the search engines have proven that techniques like this often do still work. In fact, the bridal store ranks #2 for [bridal store mississauga], likely one of their most coveted keywords. They are outranked only by a shop in Mississauga actually named The Bridal Store. Not bad, right?

But how does a badly optimized website reflect on potential customers?

I asked my friend what her impressions were prior to visiting the store. She admitted, “yeah, the website sucks.” But she actually hadn’t chosen the store because of, or in spite of, the website, but because a friend had recommended it. Had she found the site via a search, she might not have been so eager to dress shop there. I know I was a little reluctant that the store would be any good.

First impressions are important, and a website is often the first encounter potential customers have with a brand. It can be as important as the store front for brick-and-mortar businesses, so why wouldn’t you want to put your best foot forward? Perhaps a personal recommendation can overcome the impact of the website, but what if the potential customer is discovering you for the first time via your site?

Don't use rel="canonical" as a bandaid solution

There has been some recent discussion in the SEO community about whether Google and Bing have different rules for the use of the rel=”canonical” tag. Google has said it is fine to have self-referential canonical tags (ie. the rel=”canonical” tag specifies the same URL as the page you are on), whereas Bing indicates they’d prefer the canonical tag be left blank in that case.

The proper use of rel=”canonical” can be confusing at best, and can produce devastating results at worst. So what is an SEO to do?

First of all, realize that using rel=”canonical” isn’t necessary in many cases of duplicate content. The canonical tag is a great tool for extreme situations and enterprise-level sites, but on small to medium sized websites there are often other solutions.

Choose Non-WWW to WWW, or Vice Versa

A lot of canonical issues arise because a website is available at both the WWW and non-WWW versions of the domain, and other sites may end up linking to either version. Using your favorite method, redirect the non-WWW to the WWW, or vice versa. If you do this when the site is initially built, you can eliminate most instances of the wrong version being linked to (people tend to just grab whatever URL is in the address bar, anyway). Make the choice early on, and stick with it.

Don’t Use URL Parameters

If possible, try to avoid using parameters in URLs.

• If you run an e-commerce or community-based site, store all session information in a cookie rather than as parameters. This is a programming best practice to ensure users don’t get access to each others’ information.
• Avoid specifying sort order or viewing options of a search results or product page in the URL. It is better to display the page with a static URL, and make use of AJAX for sorting and filtering.
• If you use tracking parameters for referrals, replace the question mark (?) in the URL with a hashtag (#). Don’t forget to adjust your Google Analytics tracking code to allow hashtags!

Don’t Generate URLs on the Fly

Some content management systems generate page URLs on the fly, based on how the user navigated to it. I suppose the idea behind it is that the URL then becomes sort of a breadcrumb trail so the user can easily figure out how get to higher levels, but this is just a bad idea on so many levels.

Ideally, you want each product, article, post or resource to be available at a single, static URL, regardless of how the user got there.

301 Redirects

No matter how hard you try to avoid it, you sometimes end up with pages on your site being linked to in strange ways, potentially causing duplicate content issues. In cases like this, you may want to set up redirect rules that specify certain parameters (or all parameters, if you want to be extreme) get redirected back to the root page. If it only occurs on a few pages across your site, you can individually redirect them to the preferred URL (an advantage small sites have over enterprise ones).

In general, you should try to prevent duplicate content issues before they happen, or fix them when they do. Use of the rel=”canonical” tag is advanced and shouldn’t be applied as a blanket solution to all canonicalization problems.

Photo: Jason Tester/Flickr