For years now I’ve had this small message on the footer of my site to keep my phone from ringing too much. I simply didn’t have the infrastructure necessary to deal with big clients and as a result turned down big leads that came my way:

But that’s coming down and work has already begun on the first US clients that are hungry for serious results in the SERPs. Last month I spent a week with Mike Nott, Mike Jacobson, and Rob Kerry learning about the processes they’ve established, reviewing results for existing clients and getting demos of Ayima’s custom software (ohhhh the power they have there is mouth watering) it was a no brainer for me: this team has built an agency that is hands down, the best at delivering powerful results. And I’m not talking about a few rankings on lame, easy keywords. They have already hit it out of the park for large blue chip clients in the most difficult sectors such as:

• Finance
• Gaming
• Travel
• Cell Phones

Ayima is hands down, the best, results driven SEO agency out there and I’m both flattered and thrilled to be bringing this excellence to the US market.

They have fun doing it too

I jumped over to the local listing for The Morning Times in Raleigh on OhSoHandy.com and sure enough I was right. That photo was certainly taken in the upstairs lounge area:

There were over 8,500 photos in the search I was browsing through.

As I then sifted through zimmytws’s portfolio on iStockPhoto I saw more great shots of Raleigh. Excellent work zimmytws. Send me a message one day and I’ll meet you for a coffee.

On my Mac it is located at : /etc/my.cnf

Uncomment the line:

innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 50


And change the setting to 500 (its seconds)

Restart mysql and rerun your query.


sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mysql.mysqld.plist
sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mysql.mysqld.plist


If you make this change on a production server you may want to set it back to the default setting. I don’t know what the consequences of a long timeout setting would be.

John Bird and John Fortune (the Long Johns) brilliantly, and accurately, describing the mindset of the investment banking community in this satirical interview.

open .

So easy breezy.

Google sometimes I know better than you and want to see results without you thinking for me.


20 threads * 100,000 iterations
Ruby 1.9 = 1.54 s.
Ruby Enterprise = 3.01 s.
JRuby 1.1.2 = 5.82 s.
Jython 2.2.1 = 11.86 s.
Python 2.5.2 = 12.32 s.
Ruby 1.8.7 = 22.68


Since our attempt at testing Ruby as a crawler really wasn’t all that much slower than Python it could be really interesting to see what will happen with Ruby 1.9.

The blog post about the test (Its in Polish)

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.

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.