Post Installation

Post Installation Considerations

Once an installation is up and running and you have everything online there are still a few things that you should think of so that your site continues to perform as expected.

Keeping Search Engines Away (or Protecting your bandwidth)

This is something that might sound stupid. Of course you want search engines to crawl your site. When anyone is searching for one of the names in your family you want your site to feature in the results. We all do. After 20GB of bandwidth consumption you might want to control the bot a bit.

Have a look at How to restrict bot access. It shows how to make use of a robots.txt file that search engine bots should obey.

Read on for the justification.

There are many ways of viewing the data in PGV:

• Descendancy charts
• Ancestry Charts
• Relationship Charts
• Many report types
• Calendar
• etc

These are all ways that the visitor will use to follow their trails. They do this by following links.

The search engine bot will do exactly the same thing but without being selective. In your family tree it is possible that everyone is related to everyone else. The search engine bot will methodically follow all those links and as a result your bandwidth usage will go through the roof. If you have no bandwidth limits on your account there are perhaps no great downsides to this. However, many people have bandwidth limits. Some accounts will automatically charge you for the extra bandwidth used; others will suspend your account until you upgrade or until it is reset at the beginning of another month. Your monthly bandwidth can be used up within a matter of hours.

Once the search engine bot has seen all the individual's details on your site

• Names
• Dates
• Places
• Events

that is all they need. Everything else is just another way of presenting the same information.

If you wait until this happens to you it may be difficult to control at the time.