The Server Issues Thread

[Shannon]

just to help sort out the issue, if there is a bot that is mass spamming the site, it's pretty easy to find out. i know a couple things about seo (and it looks like some of our brothers on the board also know about seo! awesome!)

Since the problem appearing has to do with "reaching maximum limit", i assume it's due to server overload. therefore, it's wise to check why the server is overloaded. is it purely from traffic? 5 minutes (or less) in google analytics and/or google webmasters tools will help identify if it really is from bot traffic or from malicious intent. rather than us assuming it's a member of this board

I've made Andrew aware of the relevant posts on the disney thing.

If search engines are really sending that much traffic to this site, Andrew can take a look at Google analytics and see where the traffic is coming from and see exactly what pages it is going TO.

From what I know of SEO, search engines stopped giving as much credit to sources from forums, as it used to be a major blackhat tactic to increase a sites visibility on the search engines. Google's panda and penguin update long since made forum sources obsolete forms of SEO. And if I'm not mistaken, hummingbird update actually causes penalty if these tactics haven't been cleaned up, in an effort to de spam the Web

Plus, you would think things like "benjamin" or "yeah" or "dissonance" would cause the same type of trends in their respective journals. As those are common words, directly used in usernames on the forum.

But I must say I am mighty suspicious myself. There do exist software that send massive amount of traffic to websites. It's a form of malicious attack, along the lines of hacking but without compromising your security. It just floods the system.

I implore IML to look at Google analytics and see where the traffic is being directed from. It's pretty easy to spot something suspicious.

Andrew is going to be here in about an hour to explain what he has found. It's not what you think.