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Forcing your friends to watch 10 hours of "S%$t chimney sweeps say" videos on YouTube could be a sign you need help.

(Credit: Elizabeth Armstrong Moore/CNET)

The so-called "bible" of the mental health profession is getting an update, and version 5.0 of the American Psychiatric Association's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM) could add "Internet addiction" to its lengthy list of disorders.

The different iterations of the DSM have for decades been the go-to reference many psychiatrists use to diagnose patients. The manual has been no stranger to controversy over the years, including recent charges by some that it seems written to serve the interests of drug companies as much as those of patients.

But now the APA working group in charge of revising the DSM section on substance-related disorders has proposed adding a new non-substance based affliction--"Internet addiction."

In other words, Internet addiction could soon be classified along other listed DSM disorders like "cocaine dependence" or "Opioid abuse."

As someone who is certainly un-diagnosed, but surely shows several symptoms of a potential Internet addiction problem--as I'm guessing many of you also do--I'm suddenly offended that the only way I could learn about this development was on the Internet. I can't imagine many people who suffer from alcoholism are forced to seek information on their affliction from their bartender.

Every now and then, you might come across a reference to something called "Internet Addiction Disorder," but such a disorder is not officially recognized by any major mental health organization in the U.S. However, Chinese research published last year looked at Chinese students who used a computer around 10 hours a day, 6 days a week and found that such heavy use actually did have a measurable impact on the brain. The researchers concluded that:

...long-term Internet addiction would result in brain structural alterations, which probably contributed to chronic dysfunction in subjects...

So are you and I Internet addicts? Well, it's not yet included in the DSM, so there's no "official" way to identify the symptoms and make such a diagnosis, but Dr. Jerald L. Block recently provided a few red flags in an editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry:

1) excessive use, often associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives 2) withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension, and/or depression when the computer is inaccessible 3) tolerance, including the need for better computer equipment, more software, or more hours of use, and 4) negative repercussions, including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation, and fatigue

Yikes, as if that weren't broad enough to make any of us worry about our mental health, Dr. Block also includes gaming and texting under the umbrella of things that could be considered Internet addiction.

To its credit, the APA acknowledges that such diagnoses are problematic and will be considered "as research data accumulate."

The move to consider non-substance-abuse-based addiction disorders has also sparked a bit of a mental health smackdown between the psychiatry and psychology camps. David Elkins, president of the Society for Humanistic Psychology--a division of the American Psychological Association--has launched a petition with numerous criticisms of the proposed DSM changes. Elkins' open letter to the DSM V group includes this passage:

The Conditions Proposed by Outside Sources[13] that are under consideration for DSM-5 contain several unsubstantiated and questionable disorder categories. For example, "Apathy Syndrome," "Internet Addiction Disorder," and "Parental Alienation Syndrome" have virtually no basis in the empirical literature.

Clearly, even though the discussion has been opened on the notion of Internet addiction as a real form of mental illness, it seems the jury is still out. But if either the APA or Mr. Elkins need help in their search for data--or the lack thereof--I'm more than happy to help and dedicate endless hours combing through myriad online research journals, social networks, and other resources...it's all I'm doing these days, anyway.

(Via NY Daily News)

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Internet addiction could be dubbed official affliction in DSM-V

A Google Webmaster Help thread asks if there is an SEO benefit to going the cookieless domain route.

The simple answer is that no, there is no direct SEO impact on going with the cookieless domain. But it can impact site speed, which is now a direct SEO factor, although it likely won't have a serious impact if any on your rankings if you do use cookies, since most of the web pages on the internet that you visit and rank high in Google do have cookies.

Google's John Mueller explains why people use cookieless domain:

The idea behind a cookieless domain is that it can speed up transferring static files by the browser not having to send cookies with every request. This is something that can help to reduce the time needed to render a page, if you have static, shared content.

But does it impact rankings? John said no:

A cookieless domain does not have any direct SEO effect. However, as mentioned there are situations where we may choose to use site speed as a ranking factor, so if you have a site with extremely slow-loading pages, it may make sense to review this as well as the other page-speed recommendations to help speed things up.

For more on cookieless domains, see this page.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

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Google: Cookieless Domain Have No Direct SEO Effect

The final hearings into the lese majeste charges against Prachatai webmaster Chiranuch Premchaiyaporn, who was arrested in March 2009, should be held this week.

"For three years I have had to live my life being accused of committing a crime under Section 14 and 15 of the Computer Crime Act (CCA) … without knowing when it will end," said Ms Chiranuch, in her opening statement before her trial resumed on Tuesday.

Lese majeste defendant and Prachatai webmaster Chiranuch Premchaiyaporn (Photo by Thiti Wannamontha)

Ms Chiranuch was arrested on March 6, 2009 and her trial began in the Criminal Court on March 31, 2010. At one point, she was detained in the court basement for four hours before a 300,000 baht bail guarantee was placed by her sister who was a nurse in a government hospital.

The hearings were initially scheduled for eight consecutive days in February last year but only lasted for four days with just five prosecution witnesses available. The other witnesses said they could not attend on the scheduled dates, resulting in the judges, prosecutors and the defence lawyers rescheduling a new hearing from September to October.

Because of the long time gap, the judges for the second session were changed under the annual routine shift of personnel in the bureaucratic system, she noted.

In September, the hearing of prosecution witnesses was completed and defense witnesses were then called. However, the massive flooding in Bangkok in October prevented the trial from continuing. Only San Francisco-based Danny O’Brien, a member of the Committee to Protect Journalists, was heard.

This week the trial resumed with three more witnesses giving testimony to the Ratchada Court.

Dr Kitipumi Chutasmit, director of Phusing Hospital, told the Court he was one of a few dozen volunteer moderators that deleted or hid inappropriate content found on the Prachatai web board.

The volunteer network was a system Prachatai had developed by soliciting help from regular readers or users to oversee debate and comments posted on the website, Dr Kitipumi said. General readers could also inform the webmaster if they found undesirable content, the Si Sa Ket-based doctor said.

Sawatree Suksri, a Thammasat University law lecturer, told the court that internet freedom was a fundamental human right and a UN report released May last year stipulated that intermediaries should not be held liable for any offence committed by a third party except if they collaborated or knew about it.

Better protection for intermediaries could be seen in most European countries, the United States and some Asian nations. For example the laws give 10 to 14 days for intermediaries to delete illegal or inappropriate content after they have been told by the authorities, Ms Sawatree said.

Ms Sawatree, an expert on the criminal code and computer crime, also said the Computer Crime Act's article 15 did not specify a similar clause (for intermediaries to clearly implement the law).

The authorities, since the CCA's inception, have yet to issue certain guidelines or regulations for parties concerned to understand and expedite the law, she told the court.

Jittat Fakcharoenphol, Kasetsart Unviersity's assistant professor on computer engineering, told the court that he was approached to be a director and treasurer of Prachatai in 2008 since the webmaster was increasingly concerned that the volunteer administrators who helped look for dubious and inappropriate content might not be adequate.

"I was about to develop a machine-learning natural language processor which is a computer program that  will highlight and/or spot the type of content that we set in the system as problematic so that the webmaster will be able to delete it in time," Mr Jittat said.
Prachatai was also considering hiring more staff for 24-hour monitoring of contents and subsequent debates, however financial problems had prevented them from doing so, the academic said.

The program-assisted censorship and manning ideas eventually were not put in place since the webmaster had decided to close down the web board as they faced more problems, Mr Jittat said.

He told the court that with between 300 and 400 issues - and up to 30 debates on each - it was impossible for the webmaster to handle surveillance. Even with more staff, human error was also a factor, he said.

During cross-examination, the prosecutor asked if it was the duty of the webmaster to take full responsibility for supervising the webboard administration. Mr Jittat said that was the case in principle.

The prosecutor asked if the problematic content printed as evidence shown to the court was all from Prachatai. Mr Jittat said the print-outs looked similar to the Prachatai webboard, but he could not guarantee or confirm if the alleged contents really appeared. As a general reader, he had not seen the content before.

"Technically, it cannot also be proved 100 per cent that what you see in front of the computer screen is content from the URL shown in the print-outs. Additions or deletions in the content page could take place before it is printed," he said.

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LM defendant to see final hearings this week

Kaspar Szymanski, a Googler responsible for webmaster outreach and a downright awesome guy, posted on Google+ some of the highlights for his team in 2011. He wrote he wanted to share his personal thoughts on the top outreach accomplishments for Google in 2011.

Let me sum them up for you:

Authorship markup option is one of his favorites. Surprisingly he mentions Panda, but he does so for good reason, explaining "I've seen a number of threads from webmasters who claimed their legit, content rich sites have been slammed by Panda. Now, I only have a limited insight into our forums escalations, as I don’t speak all the languages we support but from what I've seen the vast majority of sites that have been escalated has not been affected by this algorithmic update. Some were experiencing technical issues, others' performance in #Google #Search was just not living up to the webmasters expectation. Now, I'm not saying our algorithms are always perfect right from the beginning and surely some fine-tuning had to be done but the bottom line is that users seemed to love post-Panda results and that's what counts for me." A new design for site links Multilingual content markup Spam in Google including phishing, malware, paid PageRank passing links with ways to report it. Transparency and two way communication via Webmaster Tools, forums, Google Hangouts, and more.

What do you think?

Forum discussion on Google+.

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Google Webmaster Outreach 2011

A positive trend I have seen over the past few months is companies adopting a dedicated SEO diagnostics person or integrating SEO diagnostics into existing web diagnostics protocols.

I have seen a huge missed opportunity, especially with global companies, that don’t take the action to monitor page inclusions, duplicate content and redirection issues. It is easier than ever to add this to your workflow using free tools such as Google’s and Bing’s Webmaster tools yet many of these problems can increase rankings, traffic and revenue easier than many other tactics.

Some of the time, these diagnostics activities are viewed as “beneath” the mighty SEO and are not sexy enough for the agency to spend time to review.

However, most of the time there just is not enough time for anyone on the team to do it. I strongly suggest in this post-Panda era that companies, especially global companies, make the time or add a role to routinely monitor these issues.

Google & Bing Webmaster Tools Monitoring

The current functionality of these tools has now offers site owners a treasure trove of opportunities for quickly identifying problems ranging from broken links, missing pages, duplicate titles all of which required agency tools or manual reviews in the past.

One company I spoke with recently mentioned they took the time to fix the problems identified by Webmaster Tools in multiple English speaking markets and their pages improved over 300%. After that experience, they dedicated a resource to monitor and prioritize changes on a weekly basis.

They identified a problem in their content creation process where countries would simply copy the US page and load it in multiple countries until they could create a local page. This resulted in multiple countries being penalized for duplicate content even though they had the geographical setting set correctly.

While individual errors are not exponentially valuable, it is the aggregation and easy detection of many errors that makes preventive diagnostics reviews valuable especially to the global search team.

I suggest have your global or local teams review the main errors at least monthly to identify problems. Often, the farther away from the mothership you go, the less resources to maintain the Web. These tools can often be a great Web diagnostic tool indicating other problems on the site such as broken links and missing pages which might go undetected.

Recently, a European site owner reviewed his global Google Webmaster Tools data for the first time and found significant problems in the US and Asia with broken links and not found pages due to the use of a different URL syntax in these markets. Had they not taken this step, it would have missed out on significant traffic and upset visitors.

Using Enterprise SEO Management Tools

The sophistication of SEO tools has expanded to identify many of these issues and even those that are more complex and missed by free tools.

Enterprise SEO tools such as BrightEdge, Conductor, Covario, SEOClarity and Sycara all have some sort of diagnostics built into them beyond page level audits. These can be invaluable on a global scale to identify site-wide issues that may not have been detected by free tools. These tools are developed to empower the Enterprise SEO to scale by uncovering macro and micro issues with pages, templates and infrastructure.

Unfortunately while they are great tools, once integrated, many companies do not invest the people to review and implement the corrective actions.

Hiring The Diagnostic Specialist

As noted, many companies “want” to do preventative maintenance or diagnostics but just don’t have the business justification to budget for the resource. I suggest you start small and these reviews into the normal workflow to catch any errors to demonstrate the value for a more permanent position.

A few companies I have found created a role that integrates keyword research, report development and diagnostics. It is often a feeder position into the more advanced Search Team. If you can’t hire a full time person, start with a contractor or even a few hours from your agency is better than nothing.

Those companies that have embraced and active diagnostics role have told me the position typically paid for itself often in the first month from all of the issues that were detected and quickly resolved.

I have typically referred to this person is the cross between Sherlock Holmes and a bloodhound on a trail. Their sole role will be to dig into the site at the different levels to identify all of the mistakes, problems and general gotcha’s that your tool set identifies.

On a global level, they don’t need to speak a dozen languages since the errors are typically language independent. This person should be diligent, patient and have great attention to detail — since reviewing the various errors/issues and documenting them with corrective action while coordinating with the local or global resources can be mind-numbing work, but its success can pay off in dividends.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Multinational Search

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Developing A Global SEO Diagnostics Plan