How To Deal with Unwanted Web Traffic

Essentially anyone who creates a website wants web traffic or visits to his page. Web traffic, however, is not always good if your ‘guests’ are not actual Internet users who want to visit your site. If your bandwidth is getting used up because of spam bots, search engines, and large files, here’s how you can solve the excess web traffic problem.

1. Analyze. There are plenty of web page services that provide analytic tools to help you determine the type of web traffic that gets into your website. Not all, however, offer these tools. Check out Webalizer for a free analysis of the type of traffic that you get in your site. Once your site has been analyzed, you will get a report or a summary of where you get your web traffic. Web traffic generated by hot links, spam bots, and excessive search engine indexing should be minimized. Keep in mind, however, that you need to run the analytics tool for a couple of days or weeks so that you get an accurate idea of who or what visits your site. There will be days when not even a single spam bot will visit your site, but there could be many others when the spam bot will.
2. Optimize. Another bandwidth hog are the types of media that you put in your website, or that you use to construct your website itself. HTML is one of the commonly used coding languages for creating websites. However, HTML is not the most efficient coding system that you can use. It also tends to create larger file sizes which will take up more space. Instead, opt for better codes such as HTML 4, CSS, and XHTML. The pictures and media you place in your website should also be optimized for the web through compression and correct formatting.
3. Link reduction. Links in your site are another bandwidth hog that you should avoid. Sometimes the avatars that are used in the forums and bulletin boards that you install in your site are enough to endanger your monthly bandwidth limits. The avatar may be small, but if you use it for each post you make in your site, it will eventually add up and consume large portions of your bandwidth. The same applies to images and signatures.
4. Remove spam bots. Spam bots are scripts that will scour websites for email addresses that are later on added to a spam mailing list. Today, it is standard practice for people to conceal their email addresses by separating the email addresses with spaces and replacing the symbol “@” with “at.” Nonetheless, there are still a lot of people who leave their email addresses and there are still plenty of spam bots that will visit your site and consume your bandwidth in search of these email addresses.
5. Content. Finally, streamline your content so that only visitors who really want to visit your site will visit your site. Do this by removing content that is off topic, and which search engines can index for the wrong search queries.

Conserve your bandwidth by streamlining your web traffic to actual people who want to visit your site. These steps should help you do just that.