EEVblog Electronics Community Forum

To be honest I think people over push this SEO business, because that is what it is all about: business, many users have commented finding the forum on google when searching for the rigol or other stuff. I've setup websites before and they have got hits fairly quickly, the secret I think is just do it, do it right and you will reap. I setup www.rotaract1070.org.uk  for my rotaract district and it very soon got a lot of hits, when I looked in the stats at the searches viewers had performed to find it I noticed that it was not far down the list from the well established UK national site  that had been going for years www.rotaract.org.uk, and I did nothing special except for make sure I have plenty of relevant content.

I think this SEO lark is for the wanker "webmasters" that want to get results onto crap in hours without having anything decent to share. of course if you have a major website and then move it you will loose a back log of search results that will remain whilst being broken links until your website is recrawled and climbs the popularity list again. then again when your some ecomerce website selling the same crap as the next man I guess fractional advantages make a difference

well of course it depends on the size of your website and what you are doing. there probably are things you can do to help but really unless your trying to squeeze every ounce playing by the book tends to work quite well, word of mouth is a great way of spreading. Beleive it or not having a rushdenrotaract.org.uk (which now simply redirects to a section of the rotaract1070.org.uk) meant that someone goggling "dogging in rusdhen" (don't ask I have NO idea my website has nothing to do with that sort of thing) got us a hit, the only operative word being infact "rushden"

OH NO,

is it just me, or the forum has once again developed the speed wobbles?

As I type, it is taking an eternity to load pages.

It is 22:15 UTC 16/1/11 ATM.

Not just you, i emailed Dave and he said its slow for him too, and also that he is seeing some sort of "CPU throtalling"

That seems an awful lot of database requests when you consider the number of users and forum items on the site to be honest. I have now idea how to do diagnostics on the SMF software, but I think more investigations need to be done.

That seems "a bit" excessive.
What produces this amount of traffic, the video files?

It shouldn't be, the video is server from Youtube.

Have wordpress or smf a tool to show you how many search engine bots are on the site?
Could be a move related re-indexing of their content.

Judging by my own website, search bots don't put a big load on the server, certainly not enough to explain that amount of bandwidth.

Had some serious problems with the googlebot a while back, after a change they re-indexed the whole site. That pretty much toasted a dedicated server. It should be easy to check if such a thing is the case.

Ah, Dave posted while I was typing so lets just say rephrase this and just say:
If the video files are not the reason for the gigabytes of traffic there is another serious problem with the site.

The bandwidth isn't really the biggest concern. It would be easy to move the downloadable video files over to Amazon S3 or another CDN.

High CPU and database usage is almost certainly due to poor programming in the blog and forum software, and these could mostly be fixed by enabling content caching. The blog itself should essentially require zero database accesses once cached because there aren't thousands of comments (you can just update the cached copy when a new comment is posted) and there's no user login facility. I can't think of any reason not to enable very aggressive caching in Wordpress in the EEVblog's case.

I've never administered an SMF installation, but it looks like it has some basic caching facilities, but these require the use of a PHP accelerator which the host may or may not support (most of these are commercial software, so it's unlikely that you'll get it on a shared server). The options are to rewrite bits of the forum to be less horrible (not trivial, but it might be a fun exercise) or move to a high-end virtual private server (not a $10/month one) or a dedicated server, or switch to a better piece of software.

In Australia, two of the largest forum sites are Whirlpool, which uses completely custom software, and OCAU, which uses vBulletin, which is commercial software but not especially expensive. Most of the huge international forums seem to be using custom software.

That also does not include my other websites.
Dave.

whats the other websites?

I was checking Alexa.com for a friend's web site stats, and decided to have a look at EEVBlog's. Now, I know they are a bit of a blunt instrument, but check this http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/eevblog.com specifically Pageviews/user.

In 2010 it was hovering around 4 or 5, then all of a sudden this month it has shot up to 15. I don't believe that more people are looking at 3 times the number of pages that they were before. I'm wondering if an indexing spider has gone feral or something and is hitting the database every few minutes and indexing the entire thing, skewing the stats. It does look a bit DDOSy.

In 2010 it was hovering around 4 or 5, then all of a sudden this month it has shot up to 15. I don't believe that more people are looking at 3 times the number of pages that they were before. I'm wondering if an indexing spider has gone feral or something and is hitting the database every few minutes and indexing the entire thing, skewing the stats. It does look a bit DDOSy.

The thing to remember about Alexa is that they track sites via their toolbar. That may not work to well with this audience since we know that most toolbars s*ck. Or at least I hope so. =)

Other than that, the answer is hidden in both the host based and integrated statistic tools.