WebmasterWorld Out Of Google

Wasnt expecting what ?

 

To be dropped so quickly.

He says it was reactionary, "throw hands in the air I've had it moment."

 

Im confused.. he didnt expect to be dropped so quickly? surely thats the best thing for wmw.

He says banning the bots was a "throw hands in the air I've had it moment." ?
I dont buy that one bit. Rob, I know youve been around long enough to see wmw since the early days. Now he panics? hmm..

 

Well whatever, Dan. I'm simply telling you what he said.

None of this really makes sense to me anyway.

 

I don't think it is an issue of knowing the numbers though. It is a matter of knowing the numbers and how they impact the site. You can see all that traffic but believe the community is completely built on the regular users. When in reality they only make up a portion of it and its all the casual visitors he stop by irregularly who make up a big part of the overall community. I am not saying he didn't see the numbers. I am saying he potentially mis-read them or didn't place enough importance on them...

Or he entirely knew the full effect of his actions and did it anyways, for his own reasons. That is likely as anything else. He clearly has not publicly revealed his entire motivation for this.

 

it doesn't make sense at all................he could probably make tonnes of money of that board, it's a good niche and is famous. people would wet their pants to advertise there...then he could just buy a better server plan

 

What i want to know is how this effected their traffic (or should i say affected).

 

we can look at their alexa ranking we can't really no i dont think...unless their stats are public

 

Wonder if they might just make WMW entirely private and jack up the registration fees.

 

It'd only work if WMW contained info that was useful, and generally, it doesn't.

 

Using Alexa to determine traffic is like.... using a golf ball as a ruller.

 

Also, for someone that gets links from Google etc, they must have worked out what it would do.

Its not a site about chickens built by a 16 yr old webmaster thats experimenting. With the kinds of traffic Shawn predicts would anyone here on dp do the same thing without very good reason and plenty of forethought?


pls dont take what I said the wrong way rob 2+2=5 currently with this one..

 

Crazy_Brett??

 

no thanks, Ill pass, im on a strict diet

 

From what I've read on WMW, I'd agree with the bandwith issue as been the main reason. Why? As mentioned in this thread, they received over 12 million hits by rogue bots, that would of taken a big dent in the WMW piggybank.

.. what I can't understand though is why ban the search engines?

The only times I find WMW is when I'm searching on a SEO subject and threads in the forum appear - surely this is why subscribership and visitors to the site is so huge?

DA, in answer to your question, well you'd have to be on drugs to ban the search engines from your website, IF you use the site as a point of income, if it's a hobby site, then well that's different - but then you wouldn't have rogue bots circling like crows!

 

Yeah, I would imagine that it's pretty tough to be a fully grown adult and maintain a weight of 115 lbs. (8 stone?)

 

As mentioned rogue bots wont adhere to the robot.txt - so they are still spidering the site right?

I think its the whole search the forums thing or something. Again I dont care, just interested in see what happens.

Give it another week and dp may be the only seo related forum left judging by recent events

 

A moderately priced, high power server from The Planet comes with 2000 GB of BW. I recently sold my forum, it was a bit bigger than DP and I used about 350 GB of BW per month. Not even close to my quota. An experienced webmaster shouldn't have trouble managing BW costs on a forum like Webmasterworld. I doubt that is the problem.

Loads are more likely. It could be that he was getting hit with a lot of bots simultaneously and they were causing loads on the server to be very high over extended periods of time. High loads will slow the server down and could result in crashes and resulting corrupted database files.

 

I do about 150+ gigs a month, yes the server is expensive, but most of the fee is going towards the fact it's managed.

if i knew how to manage a site it'd be cheaper, and i could afford to not have as many ads on it to support it.

but being slapped with a huge bill every month is a bit daunting, even if you do work and can technically afford it.

it might be server loads...but i'm sure there's ways to mitigate that are there not? the only bots i see visiting my site are recognizable.

 

It's really sad because it took years to get 2 million plus pages indexed and like someone else said, unless Google makes an exception in his case it will take a long time for his pages to get back to where they were. People forget that incoming links are just one of the things Google looks at when giving page rank. Now that all his pages are gone, if he removes the robots.txt file the site will look new to the crawler and Googles algo and they will not have the relevance they once had, in my opinion.