Erase our ScreeNames from google search

itsme · Post by **itsme** » Sat Nov 13, 2010 3:00 pm

I agree dont block Bots, its will harm the form.

Most people know if you say it on a forum google and other will find it.
The last thing the forum should do is block the seartchengens that is how a site is found.

That is the reason for a user name and not your real name.

siliventurer · Post by **siliventurer** » Sat Nov 13, 2010 4:17 pm

midiman wrote:
siliventurer wrote:As I have repeatedly mentioned months ago, Google bots provided by the forum software do not have ANY effect on search ranking in their results because Google uses a very complex set of criteria for determining where a site would rank. This criteria and the system is modified so frequently by them that there is no single "key" or simple push of a button to getting the best exposure. So to block or not block would make no difference.
No matter how you see it, our traffic increased when the bots increased.

Your traffic increased because you have many websites across the internet that are hotlinking an extraordinarily large amount of content from this forum and its companion sites. Hotlinking is whereby, the image is directly loaded from the TDF server versus locally on theirs. This puts an undue amount of stress and reduces the server's available bandwidth. Hence things process and load a lot slower for those directly on the forum. It is for this reason that your traffic has increased and the guest count was incredibly high on some occasions. I'm sure if you ever do have a network traffic record of this site there will probably be a ton of accesses with durations of probably 2 minutes or less (each access counts as one guest!). This is the other server making an access to retrieve the image that has been linked on their sites.

But you probably will choose to believe what you want to.

Post by **Bianca** » Sat Nov 13, 2010 6:05 pm

Well when you see this kind of traffic it is certainly up from previous as just like some are hot links, many are browsing the site. A visitor had to set up the hot links in the first place. Regardless, the more information that is out there for searching, the more traffic is generated.

Also since it peaked, there is still a consistent number of logins, so that means if there are a lot of 2 minute sessions, then there are consistent additional logins to keep the numbers up.
This being the case, it means that people are viewing our photos and are more likely to log in here to see more which is what appears to be happening.

So although the numbers might not tell all, they do tell us traffic is up.

siliventurer · Post by **siliventurer** » Sat Nov 13, 2010 6:52 pm

Bianca wrote:Well when you see this kind of traffic it is certainly up from previous as just like some are hot links, many are browsing the site. A visitor had to set up the hot links in the first place. Regardless, the more information that is out there for searching, the more traffic is generated.

Also since it peaked, there is still a consistent number of logins, so that means if there are a lot of 2 minute sessions, then there are consistent additional logins to keep the numbers up.
This being the case, it means that people are viewing our photos and are more likely to log in here to see more which is what appears to be happening.

So although the numbers might not tell all, they do tell us traffic is up.

Like I said before, you are going to believe what you want to believe. Just realize that those brief sessions are accesses by machinery NOT human logins, hence IMO I don't consider it as traffic that is browsing through the site but rather leeching from it. And it's being loaded at the expense of the TDF server. But if the false sense of high level traffic makes you feel good, then so be it too.

I may have taken this thread off-topic so probably best to take it back on track. Main purpose of posting was to try and provide more clarity to the topic of this thread. I do hope that the original poster does get her request fulfilled and her problem remedied.

synthyours · Post by **synthyours** » Sun Nov 14, 2010 12:06 am

Not all traffic is created equal. Leeches/hotlinkers increase bandwidth as well as demand on finite server resources and deliver, in general, little benefit to the website they're hotlinking from. We used to have a server-level anti-hot-linking policy in place to prevent this from happening.

As to LP's concern, it's not at all difficult to switch a username on a post or in the text of a post. A half-competent DBA can run a quick SQL query and have that done in a few minutes. But, in general, users need to be careful when creating usernames on sites they don't want others to find out about.

IanEvans · Post by **IanEvans** » Sun Nov 14, 2010 6:14 am

synthyours wrote:...in general, users need to be careful when creating usernames on sites they don't want others to find out about.

That's precisely why I didn't use any of the names I'd used previously on other forums...though now I'm far less paranoid (as exemplified by my own face in my avatar). So I have no qualms about mentioning that I've been King Parakeet (just something fun and weird) and 20thCenturyAnalogBoy (a reference to Bad Religion's "21st Century Digital Boy" as well as to my own technological ineptitude). I even Googled both names just to see what would happen. The latter turned up a post I made on a guitar forum almost a decade ago, while the former caused me to discover that a king parakeet is an actual type of bird and not the budgerigar monarch I'd envisioned.

Sometimes I wonder if I knew when I joined TDF how open I'd eventually be that I would've simply gone with one of my old usernames. But in a way I'm glad I didn't, 'cause really, I'm not the same person I was back then....