Wednesday, March 30, 2005
An Oddity
I recently happened to look at the internal stats for traffic available through the Hosting Matters control panel, and found that our bandwidth was significantly higher than it used to be, if not yet in any danger of overages (oddly, we are about a gig and a half below what I thought was our limit, but they say we have used only 52%). I also found that some 10% of it in the past month was for one particular image; the second highest traffic item after the main page, which accounted for about 72%. Nothing else amounted even to as much as 3%.
That was the 800 pixel version of this picture:
I couldn’t figure out where it was linked exactly. It’s currently at 8.44% of our March bandwidth and has had 12,928 hits for the month.
So I enabled hotlink protection. If it’s not embedded in or opened from AV, it errors. Though I just loosened it to work if you type a direct URL into a browser address bar. Which seems to have worked for previewing in w.bloggar, where I edit most posts, as well.
Since I enabled hotlink protection, another funny thing has happened. Google Images. Tons and tons of hits in Site Meter, ones that never showed up before, from Google Images. They come up for a variety of pictures, including some of my family, Kerry-related stuff, and even Jennifer Finnigan (sorry, not nude).
However, the most popular one currently, viewed many times a day through Google Images, is the 800 pixel wide version of this one:
Why that one? I have no idea. It’s cute, but why? It’s probably 80 or 90% of the Google Image hits, most of them foreign.
And why did the hits from Google Images not show in Site Meter until I disabled hotlinking? That’s just wrong.
Site Meter truncates the long URL associated with the Google Images hits, so it’s hard to tell the exact context. The Sadie pictures do not come up if you search Accidental Verbosity on Google Images. Only a fraction of the total ever posted do, including some family pictures and the New England blogger bash pictures. I wonder what people are searching for to bring those up.
Ah, I should note that as far as I can figure, the hits for Sadie and the Dragon come from here. I forgot about that. The number of hits from that, our top external referrer, corresponds closely to the number of hits for the Dragon picture.