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The
Power of Paris Hilton
by Derek Vaughan, Director - CPU
Review
A
hacker has been sucking bandwidth out of my site recently. Maybe
you’ve heard of her – Paris Hilton. That’s right,
the Paris Hilton – heiress to the Hilton Hotel fortune,
with modelesque features, and a quasi-realty TV show. Well,
okay so she’s not a hacker, exactly – but she has
for SURE been costing me money in extra bandwidth costs and
I’m going to issue her an invoice for it!
Here’s
what happened – a couple of weeks ago I posted a news article
to my site from the newswire. I happen to run a site consisting
of a web hosting directory and web master resources. The press
release that I ran was an assessment by the Lycos search engine
describing what the hottest searches are for that particular
time period.
The
title of the press release was as follows (and I quote): Paris
Hilton Sex Video Searches Soar, Sending Socialite to Number
One Search Term; Prince Charles Scandal Continues to Rock the
Web.
It
turns out that after her notorious tape hit the Internet, ‘Paris
Hilton’ became the top search term at Lycos.
So
right about now you’re probably already jumping forward
to the logical conclusion of this story – but it just never
really occurred to me how popular Paris Hilton had become –
or that running a press release on search terms would make any
substantive difference to my website.
Everything
was going along nicely until a day or two later – when
I received an email that went something like this:
Dear
Derek Vaughan,
This
is to notify you that the allowed MB of Data Transfer per month
for
www.cpureview.com has been exceeded. You must take action now
to prevent
your site from being redirected.
Please
visit: brand x web hosting company to purchase additional data
transfer.
PLEASE NOTE: If your web site data transfer usage reaches 5
times the allowed amount of data transfer for this billing period
OR if you have not taken action within 5 days of the initial
notice (whichever comes first), your web site will be redirected.
So of course I took action and purchased additional bandwidth.
No problem, I thought – my site traffic is growing! However,
I became somewhat concerned when I received an identical notice
just 2 days later. I again paid for additional bandwidth. When
I received a third notice at the beginning of the next week
– I called my hosting company.
Me:
“Hey, there must be some mistake, my bandwidth usage can’t
be that high – is the reporting in error?”
Hosting
Company: “No Mr. Vaughan – this is correct. You’re
bandwidth usage has increased considerably.”
Me:
“Well, what’s causing all the extra usage?”
Hosting
Company: “It must be increased traffic to your site.”
So
I go back and double check my traffic logs – in particular
looking at referring URLs. It’s then that I notice this
entry:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=paris...
The
news story from my website had been spidered and picked up by
Google under the search phrase: ‘paris hilton sex video’.
During the high bandwidth period, my result was on page one
of the search results. Thankfully, my listing has now moved
down to page 7 in the results.
I
calculated it out and I figure that Paris Hilton now owes me
around $20 in extra bandwidth charges for the last 3 weeks.
I’m certain that when she receives my invoice she’ll
pay me quickly – I’m marking it ‘due upon receipt’.
The
moral of this story? Picking up the right information on your
site can get you a ton of extra traffic – so pay attention
to what goes on your site – even if it’s just a press
release.
by
Derek Vaughan, Director - CPU
Review
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