More Power
08-03-2004, 09:39
Since September of 2003, the "content" side of the web site has been separated from the bulletin board forum. The online content and the bulletin board forum each operate on its own web server, separated by nearly 2400 miles. "Content" is defined as feature articles, product reviews, technical pages and all other non-forum content produced by the writers and contributors to The Diesel Page. Each web server operates independently, and web access statistics are also independently generated.
The following data reflects the July 2004 web site traffic for the content side of The Diesel Page.
http://www.thedieselpage.com/images/aug04editorial01.gif
The Diesel Page became an internationally recognized GM diesel resource many years ago, and the following chart illustrates the worldwide usage pattern captured during the month of July 2004.
http://www.thedieselpage.com/images/aug04editorial02.gif
http://www.thedieselpage.com/images/aug04editorial03.gif
Most bulletin boards around the Internet allow search engines and archivers access to their forums and posted messages. While some search engine access might be a good thing, there are also robot engines that scour the Internet searching for email addresses to harvest for spam or for some other nefarious purpose. The sum total of all known "engines" and robots can result in forum traffic being overly inflated - even to a point of interfering with legitimate traffic generated by members and visitors (impacting server performance). Unless engines and robots are restricted, automated traffic could be higher than that generated by actual users. A robot engine will not only access a forum page, but will also open every link on that page. Forum pages are a target rich environment, having dozens to hundreds of links on each displayed forum page. The problem becomes onerous when a BB forum contains many thousands of forum topic pages.
Since the beginning, we've added code to both the web domain and to the forum pages themselves to prevent search engines and other robots from accessing our bulletin board forum. We want to be indexed by the search engines, but we do that with our online content. All new traffic comes to us through our online content - not the bulletin board forum. I have yet to see any of our bulletin board forum pages indexed by a search engine.
When BB traffic is added to the content statistics, total web site traffic is more than 1.3M hits per month.
MP
[ 08-03-2004, 10:09 AM: Message edited by: More Power ]
The following data reflects the July 2004 web site traffic for the content side of The Diesel Page.
http://www.thedieselpage.com/images/aug04editorial01.gif
The Diesel Page became an internationally recognized GM diesel resource many years ago, and the following chart illustrates the worldwide usage pattern captured during the month of July 2004.
http://www.thedieselpage.com/images/aug04editorial02.gif
http://www.thedieselpage.com/images/aug04editorial03.gif
Most bulletin boards around the Internet allow search engines and archivers access to their forums and posted messages. While some search engine access might be a good thing, there are also robot engines that scour the Internet searching for email addresses to harvest for spam or for some other nefarious purpose. The sum total of all known "engines" and robots can result in forum traffic being overly inflated - even to a point of interfering with legitimate traffic generated by members and visitors (impacting server performance). Unless engines and robots are restricted, automated traffic could be higher than that generated by actual users. A robot engine will not only access a forum page, but will also open every link on that page. Forum pages are a target rich environment, having dozens to hundreds of links on each displayed forum page. The problem becomes onerous when a BB forum contains many thousands of forum topic pages.
Since the beginning, we've added code to both the web domain and to the forum pages themselves to prevent search engines and other robots from accessing our bulletin board forum. We want to be indexed by the search engines, but we do that with our online content. All new traffic comes to us through our online content - not the bulletin board forum. I have yet to see any of our bulletin board forum pages indexed by a search engine.
When BB traffic is added to the content statistics, total web site traffic is more than 1.3M hits per month.
MP
[ 08-03-2004, 10:09 AM: Message edited by: More Power ]