gerhard killesreiter's blog

Once in a while I log into google to look at their webmaster tools and what they say about drupal.org.

Yesterday, I did that again, after a hiatus of several weeks. I noticed, that google had sent me three mails which didn't make it to my inbox because I hadn't configured email forwarding.

After fixing that I looked at the mails.

One was abotu their services, they want me to use Adwords and offer some free budget. The other two were almost identical and they probably had sent the second one after I didn't react on the first:

Google thinks we have too many links!

They said that the huge amount of links may lead to googlebot not being able to index all of them and we should consider if maybe we could exclude some through robots.txt.

The title is a German proverb which translates as "hit dogs bark" and means that people will react once they feel sufficiently threatened.

The proverb apparently applies to Phorm a UK company that wants to use Deep Packet Inspection to serve ads. They have been critizied for their plan, and I also wrote them a letter asking them to exempt drupal.org from their plans (besides an auto-reply no answer was received).

The title is a German proverb which translates as "hit dogs bark" and means that people will react once they feel sufficiently threatened.

Googlebot is a frequent visitor(*) of drupal.org, eating over 50GB of traffic in over 11 million requests in March. I didn't know that the postprocessing is also quite fast.

Today, one of our helpful users reported some spam which was created by a new user. The user was a member for 2 hours and the spam itself was just over 1 hours old before I deleted it.

After I deleted it, I thought that it would have been entertaining to show it to somebody (the subject of the spam was hardware for your shower) and I decided to look in google. I didn't really expect it to be there, but there it was "found one hour ago". That means that googlebot picked it up within the first few minutes after its creation and it was in the search results shortly afterwards. Considering the huge amount of websites that googlebot looks at I find this pretty impressive.

Maybe they don't but they have realized that their spam profiles on drupal.org are too short-lived to get them much traffic. As a result of this, the number of new spam profiles seems to be down.

As a side note: In part due to the spam profiles and the google traffic that they generated drupal.org served more than 30 Mio pages in March. This is an increase of about 38% compared to February with 22 Mio viewed pages.

The bigger part of this surge can probably be attributed to DrupalCon at the beginning of March.

Here's a table of the number of 403 pages by month:

So, after I claaimed we'd have less spammers than others, I wanted to find out how many spammers we've actually had.

mysql> select EXTRACT(YEAR_MONTH FROM from_unixtime(created)) as yearmonth, count(*) as count from users where status = 0 and login != 0 group by yearmonth order by yearmonth desc ;