Googlebots
 

Just wondering if anyone else has noticed an unusually large amount of googlebot traffic at their site?

My site usually gets 28 to 50 googlebot visits per day. It's been getting 500 to 1800 over the last 3 or 4 days.

Also, does anyone have any thoughts as to why this is occurring?

CJS

The only thing I've noticed is that the last 3-4 days many sites lost PR.

Some of mine lost some PR.

And yes I have seen an unusual large amount of googlebot traffic.

My site has been getting between 15-30 visits which is about normal for me.

Googlebot traffic at the mighty Perve looks normal, but Whoring is seeing an increase.

I've only checked my bigger sites and all have gb increase in the rage You have mentioned.
what gets me a bit confused it that increase came after PR changes

I don't put much stock in toolbar page rank. I'm just curious as to why google is spidering us so much. Is it just the adult industry? Is it just some adult sites? Is it all industries? I understand that google just hit the bloggers pretty hard. It appears that tgp's are doing well with google right now. If an editor from google looked at the adult results would they think that they are delivering good results or would they try to adjust their algo right away to deliver better results? If this is so, would they spider our industry hard with the intent to do a big adjustment/dance? Just my thoughts, I have no answers to any of the above.

I somehow doubt that Google look at adult much differently than they do at "non-adult". I think the algo is blind to the content and niche, in that respect. If they change it, it's going to be applied all over, to mainstream and adult.

Interesting about the increased GB activity. I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary in a couple of sites I looked over the other day.

Maybe something to do with this, because we do as lot of linking!|huh

A couple of articles about Google clamping down on paid links that might tie in with what we are seeing.

Google has confirmed that the recent update to its "visible PageRank" system is an effort to crackdown on sites trying to rig this closely-watched web popularity contest.
http://www.theregister.com/2007/10/3...gerank_change/

I imagine Google is putting on the PR-smackdown show in order to make a statement, and I believe that statement is: "This is your chance to put nofollow on your paid-for links. If you don't, we might actually make this penalty the real thing."
http://www.mainstreamwebmasters.com/article1567.html

That is highly possible, Tickler. If google is cracking down on paid links, crawling all over Link Lists with googlebot would not be out of the question. They could be trying to determine if we're (meaning the Link Lists) are buying and selling links.

Traffic linking is different, the kind of thing google is cracking down on is paid PR links where web directories charge for a listing because they believe they should on high PR.

I've seen a few PR3,4 asking anything upto $50 + just for a regular listing which is bollocks as they don't have or send any traffic.

If you want PR you go to a web directory, if you want traffic you go to a Link list.

If people want to boast anything on their site then a traffic rank is the thing.

Bobc01, I hope that google understands that as well. It's always concerned me that google may not like the Link List model.

It should be obvious that link lists are all about traffic as what LL owner or free site owner is concearned about their PR or ever uses it as a listing feature.

Go to any web directory forum and it's nothing but PR this PR that and what they think they can charge for a listing.

I was reading somewhere that google wants the use of nofollow tags on sponsored/paid links, they've kicked a fair few directories off the serps for what they say as selling PR and sponsored links can be seen in the same way.

I suppose what they're saying is, we all link to a sponsor with various anchored text, that boosts the link popularity of that sponsor which obviously sends it up the serps on top keywords.

In effect, we're kicking our own asses by boosting the link popularity as people will search first.

I think this is all related to the PR spankings that are seen everywhere.

Does this make sense to anyone else or have i missed on something else?

Bobc01, IMHO it does make sense to nofollow links to sponsors for the reasons that you stated. I don't think that google will try to force anyone to do this though. Also, looking at toolbar page rank is almost a futile task because google does not display true page rank (the toolbar is an approximation...google keeps the actual page rank to themselves) nor does google display true backlinks.

Just an FYI for everyone, we are still getting crawled by alot more googlebots than normal. Still no clue as to why.

Seems a bit of a controversial subject on nofollow tags and i'm not sure on the general view on those.

As i understand it, the latest PR update was given as warning on things like this but again, other people may know different.

I'll have a look for the various links on this later.

But, we aren't all linking to the same page.

Doesn't matter, boosting the link popularity to pages on the same domain boosts the PR overal.

It's classed as un-natural linking.

So unnatural linking is a good thing? And how does PR come into it? If anything, wouldn't the domain get penalised (as such) for, in some cases, thousands of duplicate doorways?

The 3 things google ranks a site on are quality, relevancy and popularity.
Each backlink to a site is classed as a vote for that site in the serps so obviously, the more backlinks/votes the higher the ranking and PR.
Theres more to it than that but that's the basics.

The thing is, we don't have sponsored links to vote for them and google will see it in the same way, so that link is boosting the popularity of that sponsor site for the wrong reasons.

OK, I got the first part, but am not getting the 2nd part, 'we don't have sponsored links to vote for them' - lay it out for a 9am UK time brain?

As far as I was concerned, the more links from domains to your particular refcode, e.g. domain.com/?123456, the more google places popularity/relevance on that particular page, hence some people's aff codes appearing higher in the serps than for the actual paysite name. Have I got the wrong end of the stick there?

lol i know what you mean, it's 10:00 and i'm still up.


This might help... http://www.geeknewsweek.net/archive/...6_archive.html

That's the way I see it as well. Bob, do you have any established source for this theory of "links to sub-pages enforcing the PR of the main page"? I've never heard that one before, and AFAIK, each page is unique for Google, be it the main page or a sub-page. If you have any reference to anything different, I'd be happy to see it.

Thanks :)

OK I get the second part now, I was reading it wrong :D So, Google is saying these sponsor links are, in effect, paid links, correct? In which case, wouldn't the effect be that Google penalises the sponsor sites for 'buying' links?

It's early....

I don't see how that article is related, really. The cracking on paid links issue has been known for a while, and essentially means you may consider putting a nofollow tag on anything that isn't a hard-link exchange. It makes no difference whether these are links to sponsors, to toplists or anything else. And it doesn't mean that the affiliate links with ref code somehow boost the overall PR of the root of a domain.

BTW, I think Matt Cutts explained in the original blog post he made that buyers won't be penalized, only sellers (or perceived sellers).