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Something to watch out for with blogs

About 3 weeks ago, I put up a blog using b2evolution. There were a few posts and a few people found the site due to it. Unfortunately, it has a feature that provides credit to people who refer visitors to the blog. Within 2 weeks, my site had picked up so much traffic that it filled my space allocation with log records and used 3 times my monthly bandwidth allocation in about a week. I had to shut it down. It was abusive traffic, not the good kind. Apparently certain companies were increasing links for various products by “referring” people to the site. Turns out, it was an automated system that kept calling the site with the right header information. Some of the programs were careful to call it a couple times an hour, and some were calling it every minute to be the most active referring site. Of course search engines would crawl the page often since it was changing every minute, so the product had a link from my site to theirs. With all the blogs on the web, that product probably had tens of thousands of links to the page, bringing them high on the search engine listing. I have since changed to WordPress which does not have the most active feature. I hope I dont have to shut it down again! If you have a site that auto-generates a top referer list, be careful! Make sure that you regularly monitor your traffic. Once they get you, the site must be shut down for over a week to clear it.