Sunday, December 20, 2009

A Question...

... for you bloggers who use SiteMeter.  I find this interesting... pay attention to items number three, 12, and 15 in the graphic below:

I get at least four or five hits from googlebot each and every day.  A lil bit of research on my part revealed the following, from the Wiki:
Googlebot is the search bot software used by Google, which collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google search engine.

If a webmaster wishes to restrict the information on their site available to a Googlebot, or another well-behaved spider, they can do so with the appropriate directives in a robots.txt file, or by adding the meta tag to the webpage.  Googlebot requests to Web servers are identifiable by a user-agent string containing "Googlebot" and a host address containing "googlebot.com".

Currently Googlebot only follows HREF links and SRC links.  Googlebot discovers pages by harvesting all of the links on every page it finds. It then follows these links to other web pages. New web pages must be linked to other known pages on the web in order to be crawled and indexed.
Are you guys getting hits from googlebot?  And if so... are you seeing visit durations like I'm seeing?  Nearly an hour spent on my blog (re: #15, above) by a supposedly automated web-crawler is kinda strange, dontcha think?  And this happens every day!  I'm pretty sure this is why Google loves me.

8 comments:

  1. yes, I'm getting them too - and long visits as well...

    thanks for the research!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Same here, 9:55 once back a couple of days but most are very quick. I always wondered what they were.

    BT: Jimmy T sends.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Buck, it looks like I had 7 googlebot visits yesterday. Most short, but one over 7 minutes.

    I am surprised at how high I rank on many search terms. Actually, VERY surprised at some of them. Interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  4. My latest report shows one hit from Googlebot, lasting 14 seconds. I'd never looked for it before, though. Interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I confess I haven't looked at my SiteMeter stats in a long time. My site provider gives pretty good intell behind-the-scenes.

    I've had quite a few of the Googlebots hitting me lately. My site stats don't show duration of stay...I'll have to check SiteMeter out of curiosity.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Being still on training wheels with this whole blog thing, I'm ignorant to Sitemeter.

    Maybe that's best.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I need to school myself a bit more, but this kinda gives me a case of arachnaphobia!

    ReplyDelete
  8. All this is most interesting; thanks to all y'all for contributing your two cents. I did more research and found Google itself has a pretty interesting blurb on how and why they do the googlebot thing. I remain amazed at the level of effort involved (both hardware and software), given the hundreds of millions of web site there are.

    ReplyDelete

Just be polite... that's all I ask.