# puzzled by some website traffic???



## punkapalooza (Oct 18, 2006)

i just checked my stats and i had 40 page requests from this url nyjetsfan.com. further digging into the stats showed the traffic came from the message board of that site. i've never visited the site or done any marketing to it, so i am curious to know how my site was 'found' from there? just had to post about it, lol. carry on with what u were doing before u read this, lol.


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## Solmu (Aug 15, 2005)

At an absolute guess (pure speculation as to a possible cause): they have a forum, and someone on that forum found your Emo shirt funny and linked to it.


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## Solmu (Aug 15, 2005)

Okay, found the explanation.

A moderator on the fan forum on that site is using your t-shirt image as his sig, and loading it directly off your server.


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## punkapalooza (Oct 18, 2006)

Solmu said:


> Okay, found the explanation.
> 
> A moderator on the fan forum on that site is using your t-shirt image as his sig, and loading it directly off your server.


ah ok, cool. thanks mate 

p.s. i just made my 1st sale thru the new web site


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## badalou (Mar 19, 2006)

That is great news. It gives hope to all those that have been trying to use the web to sell.


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## Twinge (Apr 26, 2005)

Solmu said:


> Okay, found the explanation.
> 
> A moderator on the fan forum on that site is using your t-shirt image as his sig, and loading it directly off your server.


That's when it's time to change the image to something... _fun_.


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## Solmu (Aug 15, 2005)

Twinge said:


> That's when it's time to change the image to something... _fun_.


If it's chewing through the bandwidth, sure. I was thinking about that, and kind of in two minds as to whether the hotlinking was a good thing or a bad thing (it's at least a good sign that the shirt is liked).

Personally I'd change that image to a slightly larger version of the same image, and add a "buy this at ..." onto the image and hope the guy just leaves it as his sig.


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## punkapalooza (Oct 18, 2006)

Solmu said:


> If it's chewing through the bandwidth, sure. I was thinking about that, and kind of in two minds as to whether the hotlinking was a good thing or a bad thing (it's at least a good sign that the shirt is liked).
> 
> Personally I'd change that image to a slightly larger version of the same image, and add a "buy this at ..." onto the image and hope the guy just leaves it as his sig.


what about a gif going from the tee pic to a 'buy at...' pic?


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## Solmu (Aug 15, 2005)

There's nothing to stop you trying it  The guy may just remove the picture from his sig, but it's probably not doing you any favours at the moment anyway (someone _could_ google the phrase and find your site, but there's no reason for people to believe from its use in his sig it's even a t-shirt).


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## punkapalooza (Oct 18, 2006)

ahhh, just found another forum site where someone is using the same pic for teir avatar. i'm gonna make a gif, try to get some exsposure outta this, lol.


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## punkapalooza (Oct 18, 2006)

ok i changed the pic to an animated gif for the time being, and re named a pic of a fat naked lady to the name of the pic they originally used.


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## Twinge (Apr 26, 2005)

Solmu said:


> If it's chewing through the bandwidth, sure. I was thinking about that, and kind of in two minds as to whether the hotlinking was a good thing or a bad thing (it's at least a good sign that the shirt is liked).
> 
> Personally I'd change that image to a slightly larger version of the same image, and add a "buy this at ..." onto the image and hope the guy just leaves it as his sig.


Oh yeah, that's certainly within the possibilities. "Fun", in this case, can mean many many things =)


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## punkapalooza (Oct 18, 2006)

the naked fat lay has worked so far. one has changed their avatar and i am betting once the 2nd one sees it they will too


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## Solmu (Aug 15, 2005)

I'm not a fan of doing that myself (I don't think it's very professional), but it's not like hotlinking is a practice that should be encouraged either, so whatever works I guess.

I'd just be careful about doing that kind of thing because in future some people might be linking directly to your images for the purpose of promoting your site.


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## ellaunderground (Aug 6, 2007)

Hotlinking is NEVER good. AT ALL.

I had so much REFERRER SPAM (and this is one type of it) that my blog, which is my main source of income, had to shut down for a week while we sorted out preventing it all.

Basically referrer spam is bad because it takes CPU "time" (hey I'm not even that tech geekie myself so I don't know how to explain it more) and if it gets REALLY bad, it can cause 500 internal server outage errors on all the sites on a shared hosting server!

So mine had to be taken off the web so others could stay up until we got a script up to prevent it, but first we had to figure out why my site was being such a drain.

It was HORRIBLY upsetting.

So I may be a pre-newbie at t-shirts, but I know some stuff.

I hope I'm not too late to help, and I hope I help some Googlers or something!

I love the fat naked lady idea, actually. But there are scripts to prevent hotlinking, pure and simple. They turn an image into a plain old link, or something like that. Basically the only problem with hotlinking most people ever have to worry about is bandwidth, which should concern most webmasters! You might have to pay a higher bill, if it gets worse, or the image is put on a popular site.

You know forums are REALLY bad places for your images to be linked from, think of all those refreshes of the page!

So at the very least and most entertaining, put a fat naked lady. He he. Otherwise set up some code (you can find via Google) to put in your .htaccess file. (Sorry that sounds mightily geeky, but it's easy!)


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