DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

This blog has historically had a relatively high PageRank value, a benefit I attributed to the fact that the software that drives it was created to meet what everybody understood to be best SEO practices in 2000-2001 — for example, each article has a short and eternal URL (mouse over any article title to see its permalink), a unique and descriptive page title, and so on. I’m not sure whether SEO was an industry in 2001, but certainly it was a skill of webmasters and web engineers to build indexable websites, and SEO guidelines were formost in my mind as I architected this website.

My site’s PageRank changed in early 2006. I was reading about SEO, ironically, and I learned that sites answering to multiple URLs risk getting penalized in Google’s index due to Google’s new (early-2006) duplicate content filtering algorithm. Although I’ve only ever published my own blog URL without the ‘www’ hostname, the server hosting this site responded to both forms of the URL: both debris.com and www.debris.com. Every page on the website was available at both addresses.

I followed Matt Cutts’ advice in early 2006 to use a 301 redirect to automagically forward everyone who was trying to get to www.debris.com (or any page there) to the equivalent page at debris.com. Shortly after that, my PageRank disappeared — the Firefox PageRank plug-in reported it as “n/a;” multiple-datacenter survey tools mostly reported it as blank, with a couple datacenters inexplicably still showing 4-5.

At first I thought this was a temporary condition resulting from the 301 redirection. I waited a month or two to see if a subsequent PageRank push would reveal the effect I’d intended, that the previous PageRank of 5 for www.debris.com and 4 for debris.com would consolidate to a solid 5 or maybe even a 6 for the canonical domain. Alas, this never happened.

In May, 2006 I created an XML sitemap to seed Google’s crawlers with the newest content from this site, thinking that perhaps this would cement in the crawlers’ collective mind that, despite inbound links from 3rd party sites to formerly duplicate-content URLs, everything was happy and canonical and uniquely addressed on the server, using the technique advocated by Google’s own webspam master, Matt Cutts. The sitemap reduced traffic from the crawlers — reflecting my on-again, off-again publishing style — but unfortunately didn’t correct the site’s missing PageRank.

By early 2007, I had waited more than six months. I wondered if my site had been inadvertently penalized, for its PageRank never came back.

So, I did the thing I should have done last March, as soon as my PageRank disappeared — I filed a reinclusion request. Honestly I didn’t really need to be “reincluded,” as my site was still in the Google index, and did turn up in searches for which my site is authoritative. But it was the only trigger I had left to pull.

A week or two later I took an additional step, inspired by a blog post by Rogers Cadenhead. He described that his blog software showed his entries at multiple addresses — the home page, the category pages, the tag pages, and on each item’s permalink page. This is how debris.com works as well. Rogers describes this as a “huge mistake.” I personally disagree; this seems to me to be a service to the user. And I have to point out that Matt Cutts’ blog shows full posts at multiple URLs, all of which turn up in Google’s index.

But as Rogers points out, the best case outcome of this seems to be that Google shows an italicized message at the bottom of results pages indicating that duplicate results have been omitted. I followed his lead and sequestered all but the permalink URL from Google’s crawlers, via “nofollow” attributes on category-page HREFs and robots.txt entries for those pages. Also I dropped the category pages from the XML sitemap.

I’m not sure these category-page changes made any difference, but the reinclusion request certainly did; this site is now showing an all-time high PageRank of 6.

And it only took 30 days. Or 13 months, depending on how you count it.

Tags: seo, pagerank, 301, pr0
posted to channel: Web
updated: 2007-03-27 19:32:10

W00t! My buddy Chuck braved the fees and crowds of the Ticketmonster phone queue to score a couple seats to the Police reunion tour, co-sponsored by Geritol and Depends.

I am psyched to see Stewart Copeland play. At one time I owned both Animal Logic records and I have the Oysterhead project too — two intriguing matches that left something to be desired (my opinion: great songwriting).

There’s a great quote from Copeland in the NYT article, They Can Play. Can They Play Nice?:

Right now we’re not incredible… We started out like a high school band last week. We got to be like a college band. Yesterday we started to sound like a bar band. Today we sound like, “O.K., we could earn a living like this.” But we are not yet playing like we deserve to play in a stadium. We’ll get there, now that we’re on the right track.

Tags: thepolice, copeland
posted to channel: Music
updated: 2007-02-26 16:48:50

Following up on Office Depot’s semi-recent refusal to accept Epson brand inkjet cartridges for recycling, I contacted Epson directly.

Epson is not interested in the ecological impact of their products, apparently; they refuse to accept their own cartridges for re-use or recycling. Here is the official response:

Thank you for your interest in recycling used Epson inkjet cartridges. Due to the design of our inkjet cartridges, we do not refill or remanufacture them. Neither of these alternatives is cost effective. Nor do we have a program set up to receive them for recycling at this time. We are continuing to search for the most cost effective, consumer friendly and environmentally sound program available for disposal.

In the meantime, we recommend that you contact your local City Government and participate in their recycling and e-waste efforts whenever possible.

It’s disappointing and somewhat unbelievable that a company with Epson’s resources can simultaneously claim to be searching for a disposal program and fail to name a single such program.

Update 2007-02-15: Dave F. pointed me to CartridgeWorld, which accepts Epson inkjet cartridges for recycling. (Actually, they refill and sell the cartridges.) Thanks, Dave!

Tags: recycling, inkjet, cartridge, epson
posted to channel: Recycling
updated: 2007-02-15 23:40:55

I’ve pimped Office Depot’s inkjet-cartridge recycling program three times in this space, most breathlessly in last September’s entry Never buy printer paper again!, for hosting what was the best inkjet cartridge recycling program in the world. Today I am sad to report that Office Depot has since eviscerated the program.

It happened just one month after that September endorsement, according to Wikipedia. Instead of a cashless exchange, cartridge for paper, now the stores offer a coupon with two significant usage limitations:

1. You can redeem one coupon per day, max.
2. You have to make a purchase greater than $3 to redeem the coupon.

Worse still, they don’t accept Epson cartridges any longer. The official rule is that only cartridges with print heads are eligible; this includes most HP and Lexmark cartridges, but apparently not most Epson or Canon.

So, whereas I used to bring 1-2 cartridges to the store, and leave with 1-2 reams of paper, now I have to buy something too — but actually, because my printer is an Epson, I’m not eligible to participate at all.

It’s easy to find alternative means of recycling inkjet cartridges; for example, Sonoma County residents can search the database at recyclenow.org for multiple local drop-off points (e.g. Whole Foods and Radio Shack). Numerous national programs can be found via google.

Tags: recycling, inkjet, officedepot, cartridge
posted to channel: Recycling
updated: 2007-02-13 22:15:12

Here’s the electricity consumption of a powered, 50 watt, 8'' subwoofer, as measured with my Kill-a-Watt:

The subwoofer in question is the baby Polk Audio sub from a couple years ago, now discontinued. It claims continuous output of 50 watts, with peaks at 100 watts. In practice, the Kill-A-Watt showed it drawing about 8 watts of power when playing loud enough to rattle stuff on my desk, and possibly my fillings. (It is sitting in a corner of the office, though, which would tend to artificially boost the volume at a given power level.)

It’s disappointing that the unit draws five watts even when switched off. The eternally glowing LED on the back panel is a giveaway, I suppose. At 9¢ per kWh, it costs about $4 a year just to plug this subwoofer in. And it’s been sitting here plugged in for the better part of three years. Argh.

Tags: kill-a-watt, polk audio, phantom load
posted to channel: Conservation
updated: 2007-02-06 05:56:11