web traffic

google

Trouble In the House of Google

Let's look at where stackoverflow.com traffic came from for the year of 2010. When 88.2% of all traffic for your website comes from a single source, criticizing that single source feels … risky. And perhaps a bit churlish, like looking a gift horse in the mouth, or

By Jeff Atwood ·
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seo

The Importance of Sitemaps

So I've been busy with this Stack Overflow thing over the last two weeks. By way of apology, I'll share a little statistic you might find interesting: the percentage of traffic from search engines at stackoverflow.com. Sept 16th one day after public launch10% October 11th

By Jeff Atwood ·
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seo

SEOs: the New Pornographers of the Web

There’s something about the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry that I find highly distasteful. I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on it, until I read Rich Skrenta’s pornographers vs. SEOs. It’s all clear to me now. SEOs are the new pornographers of the

By Jeff Atwood ·
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search engine optimization

If It’s Not in Google, Does Your Website Really Exist?

Rich Skrenta, who may have written the first microcomputer virus, calls Google the start page for the Internet: The net isn’t a directed graph. It’s not a tree. It’s a single point labeled G connected to 10 billion destination pages. If the Internet were a monolithic product,

By Jeff Atwood ·
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security

Blocking Image Bandwidth Theft with URL Rewriting

I like to periodically watch the HTTP traffic on my server. I can see what I’m actually serving up over the wire, and how much bandwidth I’m using. That’s how I noticed that I’ve become somewhat popular with direct-link image bandwidth thieves. In other words, people

By Jeff Atwood ·
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