Big Traffic Troubles....Please Help....

Bellagio67

My little place on Smugmug is getting huge traffic, my stat's say 112,000 hits in the last 11 days and that's eating up my costly bandwidth. I suspect that the problem comes from headings for galleries that feature a word like "Florida" when refering to my family vacations and as a result I'll get 40,000 hits. I don't want to make my galleries private because this is a real hassel for so many friends and family who don't wan't to deal with passwords (especially Grand parants etc) Is there any way I can still use descriptive words for a gallery with out getting 10000000's of hits when strangers do a search for "wendy's birthday"? Do words in the description paragraph get searched for in a smugmug search?....I'm totally confused. I have fine-art photos of Quebec city that I do want lots of people to see but can't find them any time I do a smugmug search for "Quebec" yet my nephews birthday party gets a 20,000 hits. I'm clearly doing something wrong. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Andy

Bellagio67 wrote:

My little place on Smugmug is getting huge traffic, my stat's say 112,000 hits in the last 11 days and that's eating up my costly bandwidth. I suspect that the problem comes from headings for galleries that feature a word like "Florida" when refering to my family vacations and as a result I'll get 40,000 hits. I don't want to make my galleries private because this is a real hassel for so many friends and family who don't wan't to deal with passwords (especially Grand parants etc) Is there any way I can still use descriptive words for a gallery with out getting 10000000's of hits when strangers do a search for "wendy's birthday"? Do words in the description paragraph get searched for in a smugmug search?....I'm totally confused. I have fine-art photos of Quebec city that I do want lots of people to see but can't find them any time I do a smugmug search for "Quebec" yet my nephews birthday party gets a 20,000 hits. I'm clearly doing something wrong. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Could we have an example of your photo keywords, and also your gallery keywords, if any?

Andy

OK One suggestion is to reduce, dramatically, the size of your header. It's huge, 288Kb. That's not the only reason you're going thru a lot of bandwidth, but it's a contributor. Watch out for Banner Bloat and Other Subtle UI issues

Secondly, some of your photos are, uhm, rather attractive to many folks. I'm wondering why you allow Originals to be downloaded in your "New Stuff" Gallery - this will contribute to bandwidth usage, greatly.

Andy

Bellagio67

Andy wrote:

OK One suggestion is to reduce, dramatically, the size of your header. It's huge, 288Kb. That's not the only reason you're going thru a lot of bandwidth, but it's a contributor. Watch out for Banner Bloat and Other Subtle UI issues

Secondly, some of your photos are, uhm, rather attractive to many folks. I'm wondering why you allow Originals to be downloaded in your "New Stuff" Gallery - this will contribute to bandwidth usage, greatly.

Andy

I'll turn off "Originals" that will hopefully help a bit....one important question: Do the words in my gallery description get searched during a Smugmug Search or just my Galleries "Title Line"

Here's an example of a problem page: http://bobandstacy.smugmug.com/gallery/720930

i've made this private but I don't want it private. I suspect people are doing a smugmug search for this place and find my site.

Andy

Bellagio67 wrote:

I'll turn off "Originals" that will hopefully help a bit....one important question: Do the words in my gallery description get searched during a Smugmug Search or just my Galleries "Title Line"

Here's an example of a problem page: http://bobandstacy.smugmug.com/gallery/720930

i've made this private but I don't want it private. I suspect people are doing a smugmug search for this place and find my site.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news but you have photos on that page that are in violation of our terms of use - please remove them. If you have any questions as to which one, you can email me at help@smugmug.com

Andy

Bellagio67 wrote:

I'll turn off "Originals" that will hopefully help a bit....one important question: Do the words in my gallery description get searched during a Smugmug Search or just my Galleries "Title Line"

i've made this private but I don't want it private. I suspect people are doing a smugmug search for this place and find my site.

Anything in a public gallery is crawlable by the search engines. If it was public at one point, it got indexed and then takes time to fall off the index...

jfriend

Bellagio67 wrote:

My little place on Smugmug is getting huge traffic, my stat's say 112,000 hits in the last 11 days and that's eating up my costly bandwidth. I suspect that the problem comes from headings for galleries that feature a word like "Florida" when refering to my family vacations and as a result I'll get 40,000 hits. I don't want to make my galleries private because this is a real hassel for so many friends and family who don't wan't to deal with passwords (especially Grand parants etc) Is there any way I can still use descriptive words for a gallery with out getting 10000000's of hits when strangers do a search for "wendy's birthday"? Do words in the description paragraph get searched for in a smugmug search?....I'm totally confused. I have fine-art photos of Quebec city that I do want lots of people to see but can't find them any time I do a smugmug search for "Quebec" yet my nephews birthday party gets a 20,000 hits. I'm clearly doing something wrong. Any help is greatly appreciated.

You can probably figure out a lot more about where your traffic is coming from by studying two things:

1) The smugmug hits/download data - this will tell you how much is coming from people downloading originals.

2) Install something like statcounter on your page. That will give you great info on where people are coming from when they land on your page. Here's directions on how to install it. The only thing statcounter won't help you with is if someone is "direct linking" to your images.

docwalker

I have seen huge spikes in views of my galleries at times. Usually it is after I post new photos of events. People love the idea of online sharing and they also have gotten used to forwarding EVERYTHING they get in email. An example was after the work xmas party. I post the pics and send one email to around 60 people that were at the party. Those 60 sent the link to spouses and family. By the end of the day I was up to 500 unique visitors according to statcounter and google analytics.

Also, I see I small spike after every post that I make to a message board such as this.

Now, having said that, I ate a little more of your bandwidth to see what might be interesting people in your photos. You have some great family shots in there. But, You have a couple that are probably getting more attention than others . If you use statcounter you should be able to see the details of how they are getting there. I can tell from the visitor paths if the person clicked on a forwarded email, typed in my site name manually, or found me by searching using google.