Interspire Shopping Cart 5.0 Review

June 20th, 2009 by Chris

9 months ago I was asked by the CEO of Interspire to review their shopping cart software. I was provided with a copy of the software for free and set about doing my customary review process. Now, for those who do not know, I do not merely play with a demo to do a review, I actually build a site, so it takes awhile. Still, it doesn’t normally take 9 months. The reason it has taken so long in this case is because I have been waiting for a feature, which thus far has been vaporware. More on that later.

Pricing

Lets start out with what is perhaps the biggest complaint with Interspire, the pricing. This software is not cheap. For the purposes of this review I was given their ultimate edition, which clocks in at $1800, plus more if you want to be able to download upgrades. For a small time person wanting to merely get their feet wet with ecommerce, this would seem daunting. Still, in the grand scheme of things, $1800 is not a whole lot. You’d pay more typically to have a custom cart or site developed, and you’ll likely make back your expenditure in no time. I like to tell people how I started my first ecommerce site (not my first profitable site, I took profits from my content sites to start it) with an initial outlay of $1200. That covered all my initial inventory, merchant account, SSL certificate, I used my existing servers for hosting, did my own design, and used free OScommerce. This site made $500,000 in gross revenue over the next 6 months. In retrospect I could have spent far more to launch the site and still been wildly profitable.

It isn’t so much their upfront pricing that bothers me but rather their upgrade pricing, and in fact I’ve seen quite a few complaints about it from other users. Because I’ve been sitting on this review for 9 months I’ve actually experienced having to upgrade a couple times, and while it was free for me as part of the review, I do know that otherwise it would have been an egregious cost.

When first ordering your license you can sign up for maintenance that allows you access to upgrades for the period you request. This will add on an additional 20% to the product cost if you want a year of upgrades. But, it appears to me this covers only minor upgrades, not major upgrades. So if the software is updated from 4.0.5 to 4.0.6 it is covered, but you don’t get the 5.0 upgrade, because that is a major one (read their upgrade policy). Most other places will give you the upgrade for free within a year, that is fairly standard in the software Industry, Interspire has only a 60 day window, after that you have to pay for it (but they give you a 50% discount on the retail price, still, it is a lot of money).

On October 13th 2008 Interspire officially released version 4.0, it reached 4.0.6 by the end of March 2009, when 5.0 was released, forcing people to reup. My charge would have been around $1200 had I not gotten it for free. Furthermore, I couldn’t see what justified this being 5.0 instead of 4.1. When vBulletin (and I know I mention Jelsoft a lot, but they really are the pinnacle of website software in terms of customer service and whatnot) does a major upgrade, you know it, the new version is entirely different, it is an event. Interspire 5.0 has a lot of new features, but it is not a major upgrade in my opinion.

It seems to me like Interspire knows what their upgrade policy is and that they define product release milestones not by any accepted programming standards, but rather by what their budgetary needs are. I do not like this. I do not like this one bit. $1800 is a lot of money, but if it is a one time fee it is easy to justify, if Interspire is expecting you pay that every 6 months, then you’ve got a very high cost of ownership. Its one thing if they want to jump from 4.0.6 to 5.0 quickly if 5.0 is a major overhaul that changes systems to their core, it is a completely other thing where in any other software package the changes like with what you get with 5.0 would be considered a 4.1.

Now, as I said above, there are different pricing levels with different features, there are differences between the packages, the main one being product quantities. The cheapest package is $295 and includes capability for 100 products. The next one is $1000 and includes capabilities for 5000 products, and then the ultimate one I got that allows for unlimited products. There are other small differences and I urge you to compare them before making a purchase (if any).

Installing, Upgrading and Importing

Interspire has a very easy to use install & upgrade process, as I’ve mentioned I had to do it a couple times, very easy both times. My only issue is with the templates as I will mention below. Quick fast easy, no complaints here at all.

They also have importers for OScommerce, X-Cart, and CubeCart. I’ve not actually tried any of these. I’d be willing to try them if I had more licenses to play with and/or if Interspire started supporting dimensional shipping with UPS, but they are available.

Customer Experience

My main concerns are how easy is it to find a product on the site, add that product to the cart, and then buy the product. It is amazing how many carts mess this up. Interspire does a pretty good job with all of the above.

There are certain additions I’ve made in all carts I use to make it even better, I wouldn’t expect the software to do these, because for all I know I’m the only one that wants them, but I do find them incredibly useful.

1. Really, really, explain to people what the CVV is when checking out with a credit card. I mean, show a picture (wikipedia has some as I recall), it is on the front on AMEX, and on the back on Visa, Mastercard, and Discover. It is amazing how many people get confused on this, and then don’t check out. Interspire could do more here.

2. Make the final checkout button very prominent and flashy, flashing even. It is amazing how many people get that far and then don’t click it, this is more a problem with OScommerce and their final confirmation screen that looks like a receipt but isn’t, but still, it can’t hurt any cart. A small template change I could do, or Interspire could do. If they do it it is permanent, if I do it I gotta redo it after every upgrade.

3. Stress to the people to put in the correct billing address when checking out with a credit card. Interspire does this really good actually. They put a second place for billing address right next to your credit card number on the form, and if you put in the wrong thing, the error tells you why it was wrong (address mismatch) and again, presents that form on the same page for you to fix. OScommerce requires you to manually go back a few steps in the checkout to fix it, annoying for the user, and then they don’t buy from me.

Order Summary

Why is it so hard for some carts to provide a printable receipt after checkout? Honestly, Cubecart doesn’t, OScommerce doesn’t, what is the deal?

Interspire does not do it either when you select payment of check or money order (mail order form) they provide this sentence: “Mail a check or money order in US funds, along with a printed order summary, to:” But don’t actually provide the order summary. I guess you have to wait for the email and print it out? What if you don’t get it? Why not just put the order summary on that page?

When you pay with a credit card through authorize.net Interspire provides a link for the order summary, but again, why not put the order summary on that page? There is a ton of whitespace on it, fill that space up!

The email summaries they send are nice, put that content on the page seen after checkout.

SEO

I’ve got no complaints about the SEO for interspire’s cart. They support friendly URLS, give you control over your meta tags (not so necessary but nice) and page titles (very necessary). There are no duplicate content issues with non-canonical URLs like you’ll find in Cubecart with their reviews, or in OScommerce with a new URL for each way to view a product (from a category, from each category, from any category, or from the bestseller list or search results, blech!). There is nice keyword rich breadcrumb navigation, a nice text menu. From an SEO perspective it is an almost perfect platform. The one thing I might want is more product menu control.

For instance, it just lists all top level categories in alphabetical order. Great, but maybe I want to go two levels deep on my menu. Maybe I’d like to list a few of my most popular products indented under the category they belong too. Giving such products prominent menu links increases their intra-site link popularity, and is something I might want to do.

Category Management & Menus

Category management is good, other than the things mentioned above. I can drag categories to reorder them (though with a lot of categories, a numbering system might be easier). Categories can have their own custom template specified for display, which is a really cool feature, they can have images and you have full control over their title and meta tags. All told, Interspire has a fine category system.

On the menus, as I mentioned above, I’d like a little more control. I’d especially like the ability to put in headings (since I can’t do multi-level category listings). For instance say I ran a site for “Birds and Blooms” (a real-life gardening & birding magazine) I might want a heading for “Birds” with all the applicable product categories below it, and one for “Blooms”. This can be achieved with allowing selective multi-level display of categories (showing the top level category, and the next level down where indicated by the admin). Or with a sectioning system, either way, it’d be a good feature.

Customizing Templates

Interspire is by far, hands down, the easiest cart I’ve ever had to skin, it is miles ahead of anything else. First of all, it has a wordpress like one-click install of a new template you can download from their free template library. Chances are you’ll find one with a color scheme you like, then you can easily do the few customizations you need to do, such as specifying your logo image.

Secondly, they have an awesome inline-editing tool whereby if you’re logged in as an admin and you’re viewing the site you have the option to edit the page you’re currently viewing. It is an extremely intuitive tool, I could figure it out without looking at any reference documentation. You can do some point-click-drag editing dragging boxes around the page, or open up the files (again direct from this interface) and move the content that way. You can also use this tool to discover which files are responsible for markup you’re selling, it tells you. No more having to play “guess the template” when figuring out which file you need to open to make a small change to your template.

Thirdly, their markup is extremely clean, well commented, and intuitively named. A CSS class name lets you know what it is for, it isn’t just some programmer’s shorthand like .crc (center right column? I’d rather not guess thank you). So if you do need to do some hard editing (and I didn’t) you’re good to go.

You can also of course edit the textual content of various pages from the backend, and in fact the cart even includes a quasi CMS for articles/pages of content or store news. As well as the content of any store emails.

The one problem with this whole system is upgrades can break your templates, even the ones you’ve gotten from Interspire, and to fix it you need to get the new version that they provide, which overwrites all your changes. It would be nice if, perhaps, it only overwrote the templates you had not changed from the default, and for templates you HAD changed it gave you a side by side comparison to help you port over the changes to the new files… like vBulletin does it for instance.

So, the few minor changes I’ve made have to be redone at times, and that does get annoying.

Adding Products

Interspire has some of the best product adding features I’ve seen, with a few caveats. You can easily add all the product information, all the standard stuff, they have a very nice WYSIWYG editor, and it is easily to select one or more categories. They also allow you to select shipping weight AND dimensions (though they do not use those dimensions with UPS). You can also add a fixed shipping cost, on the product (most other carts allow that merely for your whole store) and you can offer free shipping, again, just on that one product. I appreciate that flexibility.

You can also turn on inventory tracking on a product by product basis, there are options for fill-in-the-blank fields for customers to fill in during checkout, and product level discounts, all really accessible. One really cool feature I’ve not seen elsewhere is the option to specify the template file for displaying the product page. This means that you can use different templates for different products really easily, how cool is that?

There are also tags, page titles, meta information, all for you to fill out as well, and some accounting software settings I don’t use, but if you want to integrate your cart with accounting software, I’m sure you’d like them.

The images leave something to be desired. I’ve seen carts that allow one image, and I’ve seen carts that allow more than one. Never have I seen a cart that allows 5 images, but not more. It would seem to me once you code the many::one image to product relationship, your software should be able to support any number of images, or certainly more than 5. This arbitrarily limit should be lifted. You should be able to upload any number of images that are automatically resized into thumbnails for a public gallery page as necessary.

Finally, there are product variations….

Product Variations

The main problem with Interspire’s shopping cart is their horrible product variation system. By “product variation system” I mean that system found in shopping carts whereby you can create options for a product, such as colors, or sizes, thus allowing someone to buy a shirt in x-large and green.

The way Interspire has their system is extremely powerful, more powerful in fact than most other carts I’ve tried, it is also extremely excruciating to work with.

The power, and the problem, is that Interspire allows you to set option details for every possible configuration. Blue in small, blue in medium, blue in large, blue in x-large, green in small, green in medium, green in large, green in x-large. And so on. And when I say they “allow” you to do this, I really mean require, because there is no other way to use their system. So, thinking ahead, what you end up having to do is fill out a row of form fields (including possible image upload) for the product of the number of product options multiplied together.

If your product has only a few scant options, this is not a big deal, but if your product has more options, boy howdy. Suppose you were selling engagement rings, you have a ring and first you must choose a ring size, 5-15, in whole and half sizes. 20 options right there. Then you have to choose a finish (silver, 10k, 18k, 24k white or yellow golds, platinum, tungsten, titanium, carbon, stainless steel). 12 more possibilities. Then you need to choose diamond size, setting, and cut. Say 6 different options for each. Giftbox, yes or no? 2 choices. So, just in this example, you have 20*12*6*6*6*2 = 103,680 rows of form fields to fill out. This is not a joke, this is not an error, this is the sad truth. I’ve had browsers crash using their shopping cart because I did not have enough RAM to display the page that was generated. Another user posted a complaint on their forum and for good measure he copied and pasted the entire thing into the forum, it took him over 25 posts to get it all (with the per post character limit).

Technical issues aside, how do they expect someone to sit and fill out all that information? The cheapest data entry person in the world is still going to break your budget for having to do that much work for a single product, yes, a single product. You’ll have to do this for each product on your site that has options.

Every other cart I have ever seen does this better. For instance, a 1 carat diamond may add $1000 to the base price, you don’t have to type that in a thousand times, you type it in once and the software knows to apply it to every size, setting, and cut option. Doing these kind of repetitive iterations are why computers were invented in the first place, why does Interspire not take advantage of that ability?

Now, they way they do it is powerful. For instance suppose one particular build is more expensive than others, say, a size 15 ring costs more because it uses more metal, but how much more it costs depends on the metal used. Using their system I could go in and specifically define this, I can’t do that with other carts. But with other carts I can otherwise get the product entered in minutes, not weeks.

I don’t know why they have not fixed this yet. As I said before I was asked by their CEO 9 months ago to review their software, and I noticed this issue right away, and I told them about it, and they said they’d fix it. Maybe there was a misunderstanding, but it hasn’t been fixed, and me waiting for it to be fixed is why this review is so late.

They don’t have to scrap their variation system entirely, they merely need to make two front ends for it. One, allowing the computer to take user-inputted rules and fill in all the blanks, and the other to allow the user to go in and manually edit any one of the rows as needed. They can even do it with a little javascript scriptlet. In fact, if they don’t do this, I may hire someone to do it myself, it’d be an extremely small job, and probably take a day of work at the most. It would be the equivalent of using excel or another spreadsheet, highlighting a column, and doing “fill down” with some value.

The second problem with product variations is the frontend. The way they are displayed in the template is completely obtuse and hinders purchase decision making by the consumer. Many shopping carts will display the options, and next to them they will display the price for that option. Interspire does not, instead they force you to select the option and then the price on the page changes, and if you’re good at mental math maybe you can do a quick calculation in your head to figure out how much that option cost you. I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t want to force my users to have to do mental math to spend money with me. I want to make it as easy as possible for them to spend money with me.

Users who use price in their purchase decision (which is most users) will want to know how much options cost them up front without having to play “tour the dropdown list.” Like in a restaurant you can get a steak, smothered with mushrooms is a dollar, cheese is another dollar, add salad bar for $3.99. Users then make a decision based on how much they want to eat and how much they want to spend. Contrast that with just a vague mention on the menu of “Mushrooms and cheese are extra, as is salad bar, when you order your server will tell you how much extra.” Who would like that?

I prefer using radio buttons for option selections (like OSCommerce does I believe) with the price increase (or decrease) displayed next to each option. Users can then easily see what options cost them and make their decision appropriately.

I’m not saying Interspire has to do it only my way, but doing it only the way they currently do it is a bad idea, they should at the very least provide an option to store admins for a variety of ways to display product options.

Authorize.net Integration

I don’t try out every payment gateway when I review a shopping cart, I try out the ones I use, and I use authorize.net.

Interspire’s integration leaves something to be desired, specifically they leave many fields blank, and improperly use others. This limits the usefulness of Authorize.net. I’ve had a custom cart developed, and paid less than $1000 for it, and that included an entire site, I paid less for it than what Interspire charges for their best cart, and it included a more fleshed out Authorize.net connection function.

To be specific, in the below transaction receipt EVERY FIELD under “Billing Information” should be filled out and EVERY FIELD under “Shipping Information” should be filled out. Additionally, under “Order Information” the “Description” field should not just redundantly list the order number. It should, instead, list the actual description of your order, ie, the contents of it. “1 diamond ring, pack of cheetos” like most other carts do, and like what Authorize.net says the field is supposed to be used for.

Merchant : StoreName.com (5555555)
Date/Time : 11-May-2009 02:42:07 PM

========= ORDER INFORMATION =========
Invoice : 1
Description : Your Order From StoreName (#1)
Amount : 49.95 (USD)
Payment Method : Visa
Type : Authorization and Capture

============== RESULTS ==============
Response : This transaction has been approved.
Authorization Code : 05555B
Transaction ID : 555555555555
Address Verification : Street Address: Match — First 5 Digits of Zip:
Match

==== CUSTOMER BILLING INFORMATION ===
Customer ID :
First Name : joe
Last Name : smith
Company :
Address : 123 Main Street
City : Springfield
State/Province : MS
Zip/Postal Code : 55555
Country :
Phone :
Fax :
E-Mail :

==== CUSTOMER SHIPPING INFORMATION ===
First Name :
Last Name :
Company :
Address :
City :
State/Province :
Zip/Postal Code :
Country :

======= ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ======
Tax :
Duty :
Freight :
Tax Exempt :
PO Number :

Shipping

Like most carts there is a bevy of shipping options, the one thing I care about though is missing. Support for UPS shipping based on package dimensions. I don’t know if most shopping cart developers get that two boxes can weigh the exact same amount and yet one can cost hundreds of more dollars to ship because of product dimensions, this is true on air and International shipping. UPS supports this in their API, Interspire allows you to specify dimensions on the product screens, why not connect the dots? This feels like a perpetual complaint of mine, most carts fall short here. OScommerce has this as a contribution you can install, CREloaded contains this out of the box. And X-cart supposedly does too. Interspire though falls short. Supposedly this is high on their list of priorities to add in the future though.

One thing they do that is really nice, that some other carts do not do, is have shipping zones. So you can offer say, UPS for domestic shipping and USPS for international, or free domestic and paid international. This is one thing I miss with my OScommerce stores.

Reporting

Interspire has amazing profession reporting features, blowing any other cart I’ve used out of the water. Easy Google analytics and Adwords integration, real-time graph generation, all out awesome stuff.

But perhaps the most important report they left off.

This is something where I think sometimes the developers could benefit from shadowing an actual merchant, or perhaps a US merchant, maybe it is different in Australia. Here, in the US, most merchant have to collect sales tax, and like every other cart Interspire has a zone system for sales tax collection settings. But, in addition to collecting tax, we then have to forward that tax money to our state governments, usually once a month, sometimes more or less often. Most shopping carts include a “sales tax report” that lists the taxes collected by month. This is awesome, this is great, this is absolutely necessary. Without such a report you need to go through, viewing each order, and manually add up by hand the tax collected. Actually, last time I had to do this manually, I used an custom SQL query I ran against the database directly, but still, it took more work than what I can do now with other carts, which is click a link in the admin and get a list of monthly revenue with tax & shipping broken out.

Minor Bugs

Interspire doesn’t list the version number of your current install in the backend, nor is it easily found in the header of source files. At one point I forgot which version I was running and had to go look at the original zip file from the original download. This is just weird. They do send upgrade notices telling you of a new version, but they don’t let you know what version you currently have. I’ve never seen any software, shopping cart or otherwise, that doesn’t remind you which version you’re running in the backend.

There is no way to set an SSL domain. You can turn SSL on or off, but not set your SSL domain. I’ve never seen another cart leave that out, you shouldn’t always assume that if your URL is www.example.com your SSL domain will be exactly the same, at the very least “www” usually isn’t included, but sometimes (especially people on shared hosts who use shared SSL) it is something wholly different.

Order Management

Their Order Management is awkward, and perhaps better than Cubecart, but I like OScommerce over Interspire here. First of all, they make it somewhat difficult to email customers a message about their order. For one, you can’t even do it unless you buy the most expensive cart (emailing customers about their order is now a premium option say what?), then it is just awkward. You can’t do it on main order screen, or while updating an order to mark it as shipped with a tracking number. You must click a message link to open a new page to view or send any messages, then there is no way back, you can only go to your mass order list and find the order you were working on again, not that easy to use. Time is money and the extra time it takes to email customers, something that will need to be done often, hurts. I much prefer OScommerce. You have a checkbox to indicate if the customer will be emailed when you update the status, yes or no, on every status update. This is really nice. And then of course a text box for putting in comments that can be included with any such update. Quick, easy, powerful. This is the type of feature you take for granted in software like OSC, but when it is gone you realize how important it was.

To make this even worse, the message you enter with Interspire doesn’t even get emailed to them. They mere get emailed that a message was sent, but to read it the customer has to visit your site and login. What a hassle. Why not just email them the message, add a link to reply if you want to track replies, but let the customer read the notice from their email software.

Final Thoughts

I don’t know how to feel about Interspire. On one hand, they have a nice outreach system at ideas.interspire.com and at first blush they seem to really care to make the product their customer’s want. On the other hand there was this snafu over the product variation upgrade I was told would be included in a release, and I’ve also heard reports of them censoring ideas posted when they involve pricing complaints. Then yes, the pricing. Interspire is one of the best carts I’ve used. The issues I have with them are issues I feel strongly about, but I also think they could be easily rectified making Interspire a cart that fits my needs perfectly. On the other hand they’re expensive, and they seem like a greedy company that will manipulate their upgrade policy to get the most possible dollars from their customers in a sly way. If they really wanted more money they could just charge more up front, but they don’t, so people feel tricked.

In the end I would call Interspire a Ferrari with no wheels stuck up on cinder blocks. It is high end, with a lot of features, and a high cost of ownership what with repair costs and insurance. But because of the hobbling of the product variation system it really doesn’t have the wheels to make it go.

Can I recommend them? The only thing that gives me pause is their pricing. I’ve found tons and tons and tons of complaints on the Internet about their pricing and upgrade policies. Do I want to recommend them and get you locked into having to pay thousands of dollars a year for minor upgrades? Could you find other carts that do better or the same, for less money? I think their cart is worth the initial price tag, I’m just not sure they as a company care about the customer so much as the customer’s wallet and how best to milk it. I also, obviously, cannot recommend them for any site that needs to ship large packages, or sells any product that needs variations or options, if you try to use it with either of those you’ll just be swimming up stream.

If Interspire fixed their product variations and released an equivalent of OScommerce’s UPS XML Dimensional Support contribution, and I got a better vibe from them in regards to upgrade pricing, such as a change in their policy, and their importers work. I would probably import at least one, possible more, of my existing stores onto their software. But there are a lot of “if’s” there. So until all that happens, I think I’ll have to keep looking for my vBulletin of the shopping cart world.

The next cart I plan to review is X-Cart, and as always if you’re a shopping cart company I’d be glad to review your software.

Posted in: Ecommerce by: Chris | 35 Comments »

Nofollow & PageRank Manipulation

June 17th, 2009 by Chris

Matt Cutts made a blog post you really should read.

I’ve been talking about PageRank manipulation for a long long time now, almost 8 years, going back to my time on SitePoint, doing experiments, getting a page a PR 7 with a single incoming link, editing menus to siphon PageRank to pages I desire (such as in my Hub & Spoke article). I’ve probably advocated it as a practice longer than pretty much anyone else (when I started other “professionals” often said I was full of it (mostly because they didn’t understand the math behind PageRank), only to start doing it themselves a few years later, many of them not until apparently 2007, 5 or 6 years late), the most being written in my article on internal site architecture a phrase I started using before anyone else (forgive the horn tooting, but I’m not a sensationalist writer, and I feel that the only way I get readership on this site is because on many SEO topics I was first, and I was right. So I just like to reiterate that while other more popular SEO writers are indeed more popular, they have a crappy track record). So, if you read my blog, and you’ve read my stuff, you’ve probably adopted such practices yourself, and so, you really need to read that blog post.

There are a couple of good points in that blog post. For instance Matt Cutts acknowledges what he calls “PageRank Sculpting” as a legitimate method of SEO, though he says it is something that he would consider to be “third tier” and that you should work on having good titles and content first. He also mentions menu control as a valid practice, controlling which pages are linked on your menus or from your homepage, something I taught 8 years ago (hooray vindication).

The main topic though is about rel=nofollow. Typically going back years the goal of limiting the outflow of PageRank to sites (thus keeping more within your site, and again something other SEO writers claimed was impossible, or not beneficial, or that you didn’t even lose PageRank when linking out..) was done with form based navigation, javascript based navigation, blocking links through a relay script, or all of the above.

These were all highly technical methods of blocking and more difficult to implement. Then with the advent of rel=nofollow we all had a simple and easy way to block the transfer of PageRank. Until apparently 1 year ago. 1 year ago Google, secretly, changed how they calculated PageRank (which again, this whole conversation is an implicit statement that outgoing links do indeed take PageRank away from a site’s pool in general, something that had been a contentious issue for years, as anyone who visited a forum can attest to). The change was that, in Matt’s words, instead of dividing the value a page has by the legitimate links on a page to see how much weight each link had. Instead all links on the page are now considered, ie both normal and nofollow links. So if you have 10 links on a page, and 5 are nofollowed, the total link weight is divided by 10 not 5, and the PageRank that would have been passed to the 5 nofollow links simply evaporates, rather than being passed to the 5 normal links on the page.

This is a huge issue. Suppose you have a blog with a menu of internal links totaling 20 links, and your blog post has 100 comments because you’re just that popular, and suppose 60 of those comments have outgoing links, but you rel=nofollow them because they are user contributed links and you cannot vouch for them (they could be “bad neighborhoods” and all that). Prior to this change any PageRank passed from your site, or from external sites, to this blog post would have been funneled back through your 20 internal links to the rest of your site. Your net PageRank loss, or bleed rate, would have been small, equivalent to the part of the PageRank formula known as the dampening factor.

Now, 75% of your weight is lost because the 60 nofollow links are included in the equation. That is huge. This could be why, it seems to me, there was a global PR reduction about a year ago (many sites lost PR, though relative rankings stayed level). All that PageRank evaporating instead of continuing to go around the circle. This doesn’t even just affect you if you run a blog, but also if you otherwise have links from blog posts, those links are now passing less weight to you.

Additionally, what about using rel=nofollow on your own internal links as has been widely suggested prior to this change? Well, suppose you used rel=nofollow on a login page because search engine spiders don’t need to login to your site. What exists on that login page? Typically your header, your side menu, and your footer. Previously it was suggested to nofollow such links, to prevent unnecessary drain. This is no longer a good idea. If you nofollow an internal link you lose ALL weight that link would get, whereas if you kept it live you’d lose some to the dampening factor, but much of it would flow back through the menus on that page. Better to lose only some of it than all of it. This goes for forums, and shopping carts, and any other user software with copious amounts of useless (to search engines) pages that you would have otherwise nofollowed. [b]From now on, never nofollow an internal link.[/b]

No word yet if this also applies to pages blocked with robots.txt or a noindex meta tag. Many people, including myself, use those two methods to block unwanted pages, especially in regards to forums. Forum software trots out so many different useless URLs this is a big deal. For instance at any given time on a popular forum, say SitePoint for example, you’ll have thousands of links on your homepage pointing to things like user profiles. You don’t however have thousands of forums and the user profile links drastically outnumber the actually forum content links, so you block the user profiles with robots.txt or noindex and ideally send all the link weight to your content. If this change applies to noindex and robots.txt, you’re instead just sending over half of your available link weight into the abyss. Bad idea.

So, if you still want to do PageRank Manipulation (and you should, it is the one thing that separates professionals from amateurs and can give you good success and the edge you need) these are the things you can do.

1. Control your homepage links and your menu. On my sword site I customize my left menu by hand. The software by default would link to the top level subcategories. I do that, but also pull out some products individually for direct links. This is to funnel more PR to those product pages to help them rank better. I do this because I want those products to rank better because a good rank on those products gives more profit because the product is more often searched for.

2. Use strength in numbers, if you can have big internal link menus you will keep more of the PageRank within your site regardless of outgoing links.

3. Use really obfusicating javascript OR iframes OR forms to do your external links. Suppose you have a blog post with 60 comments, put all the comments in an iframe and you mitigate the PR loss because the blog post just links once to the iframe, so if you have 20 links on your menu only 5% goes to the comments, instead of 75%. With javascript, Google can crawl basic javascript links, so you really need to mess them up. Hybrid form navigation is pretty safe.

4. Possibly use noindex or robots.txt, I’m insure if these will still work, but if they do, they’ll be good options. You can send external links through a redirect script blocked by a noindex, thus preserving the weight.

5. Box all links within a redirect warning page. Few sites do this, but it’ll work. Make a redirect page link as you would otherwise, but make it visible functional HTML, with your header, and menu, and footer, and everything else. Have this link say “You are about to leave this site for an external link. We cannot vouch for this content.” They provide the link again or use a meta redirect on a timer or javascript to forward. So suppose 75% of your link weight is going to your comments, but then the comment pages go to these gatekeeper pages, which have 20 internal links and just the 1 external link. You’ve now mitigated your PR loss by 95%*d where d is the damping factor. Not bad, and perfectly white hat. I’ve never actually heard anyone mention this type of thing for PR preservation before, the only sites I know that do it do it for legal liability reasons. Maybe I should patent the idea? In anycase you heard it here first.

6. Like 5 above, increase depth. If external links are located deep in your site, more clicks away from your homepage or other sources of weight, the less weight they will get. For instance, if you have a “links page” (something I’d never recommend) make it a “links directory” instead, thus increasing depth. This is actually also related to #1, you’re putting your most important content prominent, and putting the stuff you don’t want to get weight deep.

7. Simply do not allow certain types of external links. Removing them from blog comments for instance.

The most important thing to remember is that PageRank management is a game of percentages. You absolutely do not want to poison your site with excessive external or nofollow links on a PageRank heavy or otherwise important page. Keeping your homepage free of such influences will be a big deal and a big first step. Also, if there is a repeating link on every page of your site, making sure that isn’t hurting you is also important. The deep links from articles or whatnot are not as large of an issue (so long as they do not vastly out number the internal links on any given page, like what can happen with blog comments).

In the meantime, for right now, all of you who have put rel=nofollow on footer links to privacy policies and whatnot, take them off. They’re hurting you.

Also, if you were using rel=nofollow to control duplicate content, use rel=canonical instead. This new canonical definition is something software developers of forums and shopping carts desperately need to start adding to the default versions of their software.

Posted in: Search Engine Optimization by: Chris | 13 Comments »

Beware the Wells Fargo Merchant Account

May 13th, 2009 by Chris

I’ve twice had a Wells Fargo merchant account. I should say the old adage holds true, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame of me. But I allowed myself to be fooled. Never again, nor should anyone else be fooled. Let me state clearly and firmly, avoid Wells Fargo merchant accounts, merchant services, etc. They have extremely shady business practices.

I first got a Wells Fargo merchant account with one business and after one year they jacked up the rate so I switched. Later when I was opening another business I got another account from them. I mentioned my previous experience and the guy said they would not jack up the rate or if they did I could cancel.

Wells Fargo you see operates with the classic bait and switch sales scam.

In truth my rate was jacked up, so I called the same guy who helped me last time Wells Fargo jacked up my rate increase, and together we set up a new account.

These were not small rate increases, these were large rate increases. Two totalling 0.8%. Which is huge. On $10,000 of volume in a month that’ll cost you $80, if you process more it’ll increase. It was going to cost me more. I was looking at an increase of a monthly fee of over $200 a month. What if your phone company could jack up your wireless rate in mid contract?

Wells Fargo claims that this increase was passed down from Visa & Mastercard. I don’t buy it. Why don’t I buy it? Because I have two merchant accounts, and my other one did get a rate increase as well at the same time. How much was my rate increase with the other account? 0.05%. Big difference.

So now, I call Wells Fargo to cancel, because why not? I’ve got another account already set up. They tell me I signed a three year contract and there is a $500 cancellation fee. I read the contract I have, the maximum cancellation fee is $200, and it was only if cancelled in less than 2 years, not 3. Are they rewriting contracts now? In addition to of course having their sales rep mislead me to originally get me to sign up?

Unfortunately I feel kinda stuck. Terms within the agreement limit my legal options, and terms within the agreement indicate that if I merely ceased using them it’d constitute termination. I don’t see how they feel they can change some terms without changing other terms. My only hope is pressure, if this post gets ranked high on Google they may cancel my account for me just to shut me up (and if you folks wanna link to this post to help, it’d be awesome). I’ll also be pursuing options with my state attorney general, and with the BBB.

In the meantime, let me recommend Mike Montefusco. mmontefusco AT banccard DOT com. He is the one who has twice helped me out after Wells Fargo jacked up my rate, and the merchant accounts he has gotten me have always had competitive rates and have never had their own rates jacked up by as much as .4% at one time like Wells Fargo. If you need a merchant account, contact him.

Posted in: Ecommerce by: Chris | 106 Comments »

Back Up Your Servers!

March 26th, 2009 by Chris

I’ve talked about this before, but, it would seem a timely reminder is on hand.

Some malicious hacker attacked WebHostingTalk, one of the oldest and most popular webmaster discussion forums. He deleted the offsite backups, the onsite backups, and then deleted the database. The attacked seemed to be purely malicious.

WHT is now having to rely on a hard copy backup from October. Like in Battlestar Galactica (such a lame finale, by the way), all the networked options were compromised and only the older technology, the Galactica, survived. The hard copy.

Do you have hard copies of your important files and databases stored in a hard copy in multiple locations? How regularly do you do them? I don’t, I’m afraid to say. My databases are backed up nightly, and uploaded to third party storage, but an actual hard copy I don’t have, or rather, I haven’t made one since probably 2006. I need to get on this, and this is a timely reminder for me, and you.

At the very least everyone should set up their server to upload a copy of all backups to a second server or third party regularly like I do. It didn’t help WebHostingTalk, but their case was extreme. There are lots of such services out there, or you can just use a regular hosting account. One such service I’ve seen advertising a lot lately is Mozy.com. Amazon, I believe, also offers storage options, and some hosts offer backup specific accounts.

Posted in: Website Management by: Chris | 2 Comments »

Failing Newspapers Lobby Google for Special Treatment

March 25th, 2009 by Chris

From adage.

Many publishers resent the criteria Google uses to pick top results, starting with the original PageRank formula that depended on how many links a page got. But crumbling ad revenue is lending their push more urgency; this is no time to show up on the third page of Google search results. And as publishers renew efforts to sell some content online, moreover, they’re newly upset that Google’s algorithm penalizes paid content.

Some newspapers (or other content providers) required paid subscriptions to see their content, if so, they don’t deserve high rankings. They can pay for advertising if they want.

Many major media sites are incredibly search engine unfriendly, it is their fault for not fixing that.

Finally, have they never heard of Google News? Google News lists mostly major media sources, and lists information timely. Additionally, a few headlines are almost always included in regular Google search results.

Meanwhile, failing newspapers are also seeking a bailout from the federal government.

Darwin at work, lets hope. These companies want to hold a monopoly on content and as is so very typical of their ilk rather than competing on a level playing field they’d rather silence critics or manipulate the system to their benefit.

If the rule in business is adapt or die, these businesses that haven’t adapted need to die.

I would be, incredibly upset, if Google were to alter their algorithm to give special placements to some ridiculous arbitrary “premier partner” group.

Google’s algorithm is the ultimate free market, and if there is anything monopolistic companies hate its a free market. Thats where so many people get things wrong, many big corporations hate free market capitalism because it lowers the barrier of entry for new competitors and increases innovation. Restrictive markets with high barriers to entry allows the big corporation to maintain their dominance without really working at it.

I’m hoping the people at Google are smart enough to know better than to fall for this.

Posted in: Search Engine Optimization by: Chris | 1 Comment »

People Change, Things Stay the Same

March 10th, 2009 by Chris

Woe for the sexy days of SEO. In watching the Watchmen this weekend there is Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” during the opening credits, and that song fits my mood now. Situations have changed, but more so I have changed rather than the times, and I imagine I’m not alone.

SEO used to be sexy, different, dynamic. Things used to change regularly, but, really, they haven’t lately. I see SEO-rumor mongers (those who sell services and ergo pretty much use fear to motivate clients to keep reupping) still hard at work, but from where I sit, SEO has been pretty consistent for, 5 years. Maybe they’re not having success, but the things I do have continued to work without the need for change for 5 years. Sure, search engines have gotten much more complex in their anti-spam activities, and if you’re a black hat (even if you’d like to think you aren’t) maybe you’re having problems, but that isn’t a ranking algorithm change. A spam filter addition doesn’t mean the fundamentals have changed. If the IRS changes a rule or steps up enforcement it doesn’t mean the ways to create wealth have changed, it just means the people who cheat on their taxes are going to get caught.

So, whereas SEO used to be a field you needed to keep up on, nowadays, I don’t feel that that is true, there is no news, no changes, nothing you need to relearn. Stick to the fundamentals and you’ll do fine. When I launch a new site it is almost a forgone conclusion that I’ll get it ranked well eventually. My business has progressed to the point where I have all the tools in house I need to rank well. I sometimes don’t even bother with a third party link building campaign.

I find myself lately worrying about other things than a Google dance or an algorithm change. I worry about a trade war with China. I worry about import duties. I worry about the price of oil affecting my freight charges. I worry about warehouse space. I worry about the economy as when you get into ecommerce consumer spending is a big issue. I worry about the dollar, I worry about the Chinese RMB.

Has my change come about because the simplicity of SEO has allowed me to stop worrying about that? Or has my change come about because my business has changed to be less reliant on it? Or both? Probably both.

How about you? Am I the only one?

Posted in: General, Search Engine Optimization by: Chris | 4 Comments »

Copyright Clearance Center, Not a Scam

February 9th, 2009 by Chris

When you start officially registering various forms of intellectual property, be they copyrights or trademarks, you’ll get a lot of junk mail. Not unlike the junk mail anyone who registers a domain name gets where some unscrupulous companies try to confuse you into thinking that you owe them money to renew your domain membership, you have to look for the fine print they’re force to put on saying that they’re not your current registrar and renewing with them transfers the domain to them.

Over the past year I have been doing a lot with intellectual property, officially registering both trademarks and copyrights, and I’ve gotten quite a bit of junk mail telling me I needed to send these third party companies checks to protect my trademarks or copyrights.

It was this situation that caused me to discard various letters from The Copyright Clearance Center (copyright.com) asking me for my tax ID and various other information. Many of their letters I did not even open.

Now it is the season of tax forms, and all the 1099s from our various payees (though less than it used to be as my business is incorporated and you do not need to send a 1099 to corporations) are coming, and I received one the other day and opened it and it was from The Copyright Clearance Center. I immediately started looking for the fine print, something indicating it was not genuine, but it was genuine (or they had committed federal fraud), and apparently they had tried to pay me $2100 during the year.

So, I looked closer at them. Apparently many nations have standardized laws for the use of copyrighted materials, much like exists for radio stations and songs, where the station does not have to negotiate a set rate for each individual song with each individual copyright holder, but rather a standard fee is used. When the rights holder is in another country a centralized authority collects the fees and sends them for distribution to a domestic copyright clearance center, such as the one mentioned previous. I don’t necessarily like people being able to use my content without my permission, but it is legal through the laws of their country and they are, in the end, paying me. They could have just not paid me at all and I likely would have never known.

In my case apparently various Australian (or the same one repeatedly) school districts used some of my content. The information they had on the actual use was sketchy, being triple hearsay from across the world, but the money is real.

The Copyright Clearance Center in addition to handling these foreign repatriations, mainly functions as a clearing house for domestic based requires for the use of copyrighted content. You can register with them and provide and price your content for use and anyone can then come, pay the fee, and use it. Apparently there is a demand for my content, and I think I’ll set up an account to see if any money can be made. Sure, I could just wait until people contact me, negotiate with them, see about getting paid that way. But their setup is standardized, I get the impression many people go directly to them, and it adds legitimacy (which, lets admit, is often lacking on the Internet). If you’re a large business or content buyer (the type to actually provide a good deal of money) you’re probably more likely to go to such a central location to find content than to try to deal with small individual rights holders.

In the end, I see this as a good way to create another passive income stream for my business, and I already know it works, I have 2100 reasons to think so.

Posted in: General, Generating Revenue, Website Management by: Chris | 3 Comments »

Google Malware Filter Goes Haywire, Internet Breaks, Google Slanders Millions

January 31st, 2009 by Chris

This morning Google’s malware filter went berserk. This is a feature where if Google detects that a website hosts a malicious download, it will put a barrier between Google search results and that website. This barrier explains that this site has badware hosted on it, and that the user may want to choose a different website instead. Additionally the filter puts warnings in Google Webmaster Tools for webmasters to see.

Basically, whoever messed up at Google this morning, should be fired, because they just about broke the Internet. Someone did something so that EVERY site in Google’s index was listed as having malware (at least, every site I checked). So basically, Google’s search engine stopped functioning for a few hours. That, is news, and a big PR problem for Google.

What is more, Google just committed millions of counts of libel. Libel is spreading false defamatory information as fact to the public, damages being granted based upon lost revenue due to this defamation.

So Google defamed every website on the Internet by saying, falsely, that they contained malicious code, Google is seen as a reputable source, so any reasonable person would believe this assertion as fact. This is textbook libel. This directly cost every website on the Internet traffic and the resulting ad revenue and or ecommerce sales are easily measurable. If I ran a website that lost enough money because of this to justify a lawsuit I’d probably be calling a lawyer. Some large operations probably lost millions because of this error, I may have lost a few hundred. You never know, Google could have run interference on a customer wanting to place a big order on one of my ecommerce sites.

Google needs to be REALLY careful with things like this, and in this case they dropped the ball. I was always a little nervous about this filter, though in general I was in favor of it because it most often blocked all the low quality spam sites out there (that as often as not have stolen content from you and me). But I was nervous because of the potential for false positives, and never did I think that Google could mess up so badly as to make millions of false positives. Google needs to be more careful with such things, I would not be surprised if some lawyer follows my thinking and opens a class action lawsuit.

Related Story at Washington Post.

Posted in: General, Search Engine Optimization by: Chris | 7 Comments »

CubeCart Review Update

December 22nd, 2008 by Chris

After using CubeCart on two sites for about a year I can definitely say the honeymoon is over. I was perhaps hasty in giving it the glowing recommendation I did, after only using it a short period of time. I really can’t recommend it to anyone anymore, it isn’t pay cart quality, it is free cart quality. I would not pay for it again nor recommend anyone else do the same.

The small bugs I mentioned in my above review are still not fixed, and that is just indicative of an overall culture of incompetence on behalf of the CubeCart developers. They remind me of building contracts who do just the bare minimum to get by. Far too many commonly desired features, needed features, features that would be standard in other carts, are passed off to third party developers. A common excuse given on CubeCart’s official forums is that such-and-such feature exists as a third party hack and so doesn’t need to be a part of the official core or supported as such (such as… a contact us form. CubeCart doesn’t come with a way for customers to contact the store owner through the website, you need a third party mod to do that. Unbelievable? Believe it). Unless you pay more for it, official support is all but absent, it is nearly impossible to get a word from a developer. Contrast that with vBulletin (which is in my opinion the best produced software in this class), which has rampant official support on their forums, ticket system, and otherwise.

The backend system, which initially seemed nicely designed, is anything but. When you actually start needing to do work on it, you often have to play “guess the file” to figure out which file controls which feature. Asking a developer which file it is so you could do the fix yourself would be a simple question for them to answer, but they do not. Another annoyance is their official site requires no less than 4 separate logins for 4 separate systems to use fully. I kid you not.

Then there are all the little annoyances. They give you the option to put a captcha on everything, or nothing, with no middle ground. So you can choose to not have a captcha on user reviews, email to a friend features, and email contract forms, or you can choose to have a captcha in all those places that need one, but also in the checkout form just so you can be sure that no less-than-savvy perhaps-elderly person ever buys a product from you, and of course all those spam bots with credit cards don’t buy Christmas presents through your site. What does a spam bot want for Christmas? I don’t know, but apparently the developers at CubeCart wanted to be sure that they couldn’t buy from you! (note, no other cart does this).

Then there are the emails, the email confirming an order before an order is complete is both annoying, and confusing, and can cost you money. One of the most popular third party modules out there turns this off. Does CubeCart consider adding a simple admin option in an update to turn it off? No, because their culture of incompetence means that if a third party individual provides a hack, let their customers mess with it, they don’t need to include that feature. Also consequently stock levels are decreased by these incomplete orders, which makes their stock management nearly worthless.

There are many minor issues and bugs that if I were hiring someone to code this for me custom, I would not have released final payment yet because they aren’t fixed, really simple fixes that just go ignored.

They also do not provide an easy way to add new order statuses outside of the default. Many times a store owner will be able to do this from the admin area of the cart, but not with CubeCart. You need to edit at least two files, I say at least two because I’ve found one and made edits but it hasn’t stuck, so there must be another, which I’ve been unable to find, and yes, I’ve asked for help. No such luck there. If this were a forum script it would be equivalent to not allowing the creation, edit, or deletion of usergroups in the admin backend.

All told the admin options of CubeCart are probably the weakest of any cart I’ve seen. Usually most software in this class has pages of admin options, CubeCart has a page. When you just install it with default settings this doesn’t matter, but as you use the software for a longer period of time and start to want to change things, this is a huge roadblock you run into.

Order management is also lacking. The inability to search for orders by customer name is a real hassle. You can search for customers, and then view orders for that customer, but it is very easy to cut those steps in half, and most shopping carts do that. Then the way they display order information means that if a customer has a longer name or address all of it is not available on the screen at one time, you literally have to scroll multiple text boxes to view it all, which increased the labor needed to process each order for shipping. Finally, they need to offer more control on order-page-based email communications with customers.

I’ve been asked by the developers of both X-Cart and Interspire to review their carts, and I plan to do so in the coming months. Whichever one I like more I’ll likely switch my CubeCart sites to, and recommend instead. I’ve already used Interspire (started my testing of it) and their admin area is awesome, except for one issue, which I’ve informed the CEO about, and he has told me they will fix it in the next version. I’ve not yet started testing the brand new version of X-Cart, but the press release lists some new features that make me drool. Interspire is a lot more expensive, but X-Cart is on parity with CubeCart price wise, and so if you need a cart to use right now and can’t wait for my reviews, perhaps try one of these.

Posted in: Ecommerce by: Chris | 48 Comments »

Save 25% at Best of the Web with Coupon

December 4th, 2008 by Chris

Best of the Web What I consider the #3 Internet directory (and surely, miles ahead of any #4) is running a 25% off coupon. This is the largest discount I’ve ever seen them run and can save you a big chunk of change on directory submissions. The coupon code is “BLIZZARD” and it expires on January 10th.

Their cost for a one time submission is $250, so 25% off is about $60. Nice savings that. I wish I had a few projects I’m working on done so that I could take advantage of this coupon, alas I do not. I think perhaps in the future what I’ll do is not submit anything until they have a sale, I don’t think I’ll see 25% off again, but they do run other coupons a couple times a year.

Posted in: Search Engine Optimization by: Chris | No Comments »

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