We’ll he’s been quick to apologize so of course that makes it all ok.

Example:
I replied to @benwills‘ tweet :

with:

but if you click on the ” in reply to benwills” link in my reply it goes to the wrong tweet.

Justice Scalia nailed it. “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.”
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“The American people consider the handgun to be the quintessential self-defense weapon.” He went on to argue: “There are many reasons that a citizen may prefer a handgun for home defense: it is easier to store in a location that is readily accessible in an emergency; it cannot easily be redirected or wrestled away by an attacker; it is easier to use for those without the upper-body strength to lift and aim a long rifle; it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police. Whatever the reason, handguns are the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home, and a complete prohibition of their use is invalid.”
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“We hold that the District’s ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment, as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense.”

Python, C, Perl, whatever.

During the month of April I began to notice a lot of our internal search pages were not only indexed but outranking the relevant pages for a user’s query. For instance, if you Googled “SubConscious Subs” the first page to appear in the SERP’s would be something like:
http://raleigh.ohsohandy.com/ads/search?q=tables

rather than the page for the establishment:
http://raleigh.ohsohandy.com/review/27571-sub-concious-subs

This wasn’t just a random occurrence. It was happening a lot and in addition to the landing pages being far less relevant for the user, they weren’t optimized for the best placement in the search engines so they were appearing in position #20 instead of say position #6. These local search pages even had pagerank usually between 2 and 3.

Hmm, Just How Bad is This Problem

Eventually I began to realize how often I was running into this in Google, noticed my recent, slow, decline in traffic and it occurred to me this may be a real problem. I’ve never linked to any local search pages on OhSoHandy.com and I couldn’t see that anyone else had either. I queried to find out how many search pages Google had indexed:

Whoa. 5,000+ pages of junk in the index with pagerank. I slept on it for a night, got up the next morning and plugged in

Disallow: /ads/search?q=*

in robots.txt (and threw in a meta robots noindex on those pages for safe measure). Within a week we saw a big improvement in rankings due to properly optimized pages trumping crap and traffic is up 25% since the change and back to trending upwards weekly instead of stagnant, slow decline.

Bit of Advice

The robots.txt disallow works but it is slow to remove the URL’s from Google’s index. I added the meta noindex tag to the search pages a week later and saw much faster results.

“Hi my name is Chelsea and we’re going door to door to win back the White House and all of Con—–”

Me: “You’re are the wrong house.”

Chelsea: “Oh. Ok.”

Good luck Chelsea! It’s going to be an interesting one for sure!

It just reiterates what I said last week, what Ron Paul has said, and what Hillary, Obama, and McCain don’t want to admit. Congress chose to cripple the US supply of crude oil by restricting drilling, Bill Clinton vetoed the bill to allow drilling in ANWR in 1995, and now the American people are paying for it.

“The place to start the free market is in our own country,” said one executive. [The drilling ban] sets the stage for OPEC to do what we are doing in our own country, and that is effectively limiting supplies.”

BINGO!

And now Congress will sue OPEC. I want to laugh but its just not funny. How about doing something meaningful rather than all the useless political posturing?

Latest Stats:
35.6 URLs per second
3.073 Million URLs per day!

Whats most promising is that the new fat pipe is still the bottleneck which means that if anybody really wants to party, all we need to do is lay down some greenbacks and a OC-12 will show us mass terabyte pleasure.