Preparing Your Blog for a Good Farking

The Search Engine Journal was Farked today with a major Fark link to a story we did on the amount of porn sites listed in Google Base. From experience in the past with being Slashdotted and Google News'd (front page scoop on Kazaa bust years ago) I took action before traffic peaked.

Bandwidth and Server Drain

First I accessed my web hosting plan and allowed for a boost in bandwidth for the rest of the month. Being the 23rd of the month, used bandwidth is extra high as is. As an extra precaution, I allowed for 10K of extra bandwidth from the Search Engine Journal (in case this grows to a Slashdot or Digg feature link too).

With a VPS (virtual private server) or reselling account, you should be able to handle this easily by limiting the amount of allowed bandwidth from other sites, and adding that bandwidth to your major bandwidth drain site. If you have a regular hosting account and fear a bandwdith drain, contact you host immediately for extended bandwidth.

Load Time & Advertisements

I visited the post featured on Fark about 5 times over a one minute period. Sometimes the load time was instant and on occasion there was a stall in some of the advertising scripts being called upon during the page load.

This draws up an interesting question; what's more important .. advertising impressions or load time?

Boosting RSS Subscribers

Since Fark users are less likely to click on some of the ads running on the page right now, and maybe more likely to subscribe to my web feed, replacing an advertisement with subscription buttons to my RSS feed may cut down on load time, enhance the user experience, and benefit my site more in the long term.

Additionally, I personalized my feed subscription "ad" with a message for Fark users. Instead of reading "feed me ... FEED ME!" in the ad I changed it to "feed me ... FARK ME!" A bit strange, but Farky. From past experience I would also suggest addressing Slashdot visitors in your blog post in a more civilized fashion.

On Blog Comments

After making these initial changes I responded to a comment about the post and addressed the Fark community, simply saying "I've been Farked!"

Someone visiting the site from Fark responded with "Too bad fark is full of fags."

Under normal situations I would immediately erase such a comment. But in this case, letting it simmer for a while may strike up more Farky conversation on the blog and get readers more involved, hopefully again, adding to the new RSS subscriptions from being FARK'd.

At the end of the day I'll delete the offensive comments.

Addressing Reader Comments

Like Slashdot, Fark posts allow readers to comment on the Fark site itself. As soon as I noticed the jump in traffic I went directly to the Fark site and read the comments Fark users were posting about my blog. Multiple users posted that the link to the site I quoted in the piece (with porn search examples) is not working, making my post worthless.

I immediately edited my blog post, taking out the link to the source (and adding in the post that the source site was down) and adding examples of the Google Base searches to the very bottom of my blog posting. I could have added them in the first paragraph or two, but would rather the 10,000's of reader to the site finish the entire post before clicking off my site to the example searches. I also made sure those links opened in a new window, hoping that the new readers would click back to my blog, and hopefully sniff around a bit more, subscribe to my RSS feeds, or click on an advertisement.

Again, I would not normally link to porn search results, but for this short period of time during this surge of traffic, I will link to the examples and also add a warning about them being for users over 18 and Not Safe For Work.

As an added bonus I made a post on the Fark comments myself, having been a Farker for some long time now (even though I did not submit this story to Fark myself).

Extreme Circumstance : PHP to HTML

Once in the past I had such a surge of traffic from a Google News #1 link during the Janet Jackson Super Bowl scandal and Lycos reporting that Janet was the most searched for term in Lycos history, that I had to save the post itself as an HTML file and replace the index.php file on my server with the HTML file.

This cut down on server drain dramatically and also served the story which 99.99% of my traffic over a three hour period wanted to see. Again, I sacrificed the other stories on my blog for the one breaking story, addressing the issue with a special note to readers why they were seeing the Janet Lycos story when they clicked over to a post on Ask Jeeves or Google oriented news.

Like the Blog Comment and Advertising Load Time examples, I decided that the long term benefit, which addressed the surge of readers, was better than the short term advertising revenue, drastically long load time, or a downed site.

Note : At the time of posting this story I've seen over 10,500 referrals from Fark over the past hour. Additionally, the trickle down trend is in effect with a featured on Digg.com, and other blogs and bookmarking services picking up the story. By placing these small changes on my blog, I'm hoping to cash in over the long term. SEJ isn't about porn, and if it was, I would have probably taken different measures like adding more advertising or affiliate links. Such surges and traffic and ways to work with the surge, as opposed to against it, should be dealt with on a case by case basis.