Photo Corners headlinesarchivemikepasini.com
A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
January Archived
1 February 2017
Volume 6 Number 1 of Photo Corners has just been archived with 18 Features, 39 commented news stories, 22 Editor's Notes (which included over 84 items of interest), one (big) review and four site notes for a total of 84 stories.
IT WAS AN UNUSUAL MONTH. We didn't get more than a day into it before our Internet Service Provider warned us we were blowing through our allotted bandwidth.
Which was odd because we'd only recently tripled our original allocation, which had been adequate for years.
A little investigation showed Googlebot had been killing us.
We have a little over 20,000 unique URLs on the site. Hitting all of them once would be 20,000 hits. And while the meat of the site is just shy of 3,200 stories, we only change a half dozen or so a day.
So if you were a bot indexing the site, you might be grabbing those six new URLs every day.
Google sent five different bots to the site. They each made one visit. They registered 230,620, 218,541, 135,228, 70,789 and 25,091 hits each on their one visit. Before we cut them off.
You won't be able to Google our latest stories but you can Bing them.
Bing, in contrast, sent eight bots. In 154 visits this month, the top downloader registered 5,928 hits. Which is why you see Bing as our default Find option.
We can't afford to let Bing visit whenever it wants. We can't even afford to let Google near the site at the moment. But we'll keep investigating the issue.
SO READERSHIP NUMBERS were a little skewed by blocking Google. We didn't see much of decrease but it feels like more of real tally without Google.
We publish for readers not rankings. And we're relieved we were able to preserve our bandwidth for real readers rather than have it consumed by runaway bots.
We're not sure what changed at Google but it was dramatic and unfortunate. You won't be able to Google our latest stories but you can Bing them. In fact, no other English-language search engine has been banned.
Our top story, interestingly enough, was a news story about the Audobon contest. And it wasn't close. It was nearly twice as popular as our Uzzle matinee, which itself was a surprise hit.
Gear is always popular and our stories about the new Nikon and Fujifilm cameras were more popular than the Panasonic and Pentax announcements.
The PhotoFairs story made the top six and our Martin Luther King Day, Jr. piece was right behind.
WE MANAGED all this running a bit on empty this month. We were slowed down the first week of the month with one of those winter illnesses. But we suspect you didn't notice.
That's really because we have a very sweet system for gathering the news and getting it out to you. And if you keep up with us using one of our feeds, you'll find items we published in the morning Horn showing up at bigger sites as news items in the afternoon.
But then bigger has never meant better.