Has Googlebot blown a gasket?

[citypublife]

I don't know if it's just my computer but whatever I ask Google to find, it returns results without any dates.

I also noticed from my server stats that googlebot didn't visit my site last week. It normally crawls my site every two days.

Is there something wrong with Googlebot? Is anybody else seeing the same thing?

London pubs and bars

[gilkesy]

So far this week - stats begin each week on Sunday - I've had the following number of visits from these search engines:

# Crawler Total Visits
1. Yahoo 2,103
2. Google 238
3. MSN 14
4. Alexa 12
5. WiseNut 11
6. Teoma 6

[sfowler]

I've had most visits from MSN recently. Googlebot has been behaving strangely. She appears and does crawl pages, but only the ones in Chinese, although these have not been updated in the past few weeks. Otherwise, yes, I have seen a lot less Googlebot activity.

[pne]

Simon is right.

Google has also been switching between old and new versions in cache (until now a Yahoo problem). Wonder if they've had problems over the last five days or so?

pne

[jbgilbert]

Agreeed... appear to be some technical issues with Google.

I've seen some log entries from Googlebot that are incomplete. Maybe Google's crawl and search is now related to (dependant on) their stock price... LOL

Plus, give Sergey and Larry a break.... it's tough running a tech company from a tiny privately owned island in the Carribean... LOL again

[sfowler]

Yes, but why just the Chinese pages? She's not fussy, both Traditional and Simplified will do, but it has to be Chinese.

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by citypublife

I don't know if it's just my computer but whatever I ask Google to find, it returns results without any dates.

Hmmm...I don't know why the dates are not showing up on fresh pages. Your Home Page was just crawled yesterday.

I also noticed from my server stats that googlebot didn't visit my site last week. It normally crawls my site every two days.

I have noticed a cyclic nature for about a month. Tuesday is Google Tuesday for one site, with a followup on Friday. There is the occasional limited daily visits which are hit and miss.

If you home page is constantly being updated, it should spur it to at least visit it more frequently and grab new links on that page. How often do you update this page?

[citypublife]

Ronnie

Dates now seem to be showing. I searched about 8 or 9 different subjects the other day and not one had a date listed in the search result.

Usually, if I type in something like London pubs and Bars etc. I find my listing and the date google shows next to it. Currently, it's the 21st, tomorrow I will look and it will be 23rd then 25th etc. I understand that to mean Googlebot last crawled my site on that date. Then, when I check my weekly server stats it will say something like, under the heading:-
Organisation Report
number of requests
Googlebot 1046 1.56%

Host Report
number of requests
300: 0.38%: crawler14.googlebot.com
310: 0.54%: crawl31.googlebot.com

Last week, there were no dates in the search and no googlebot crawls in the weekly report.

I update the front page every morning before 9am GMT as I have to put todays speed dating events on. I then update throughout the day depending on information received from publicans. Websites inside the search engine are updated every day too. (although, these are in flash and are probably not crawled).

I tend to worry about the site and content more than the stats, however, I do study them as they tell their own story. Trouble is I don't always understand the language.

Regards

Pubs in London

[ronniethedodger]

There is a new Googlebot in town running on the 66.249.64.xxx set of IP addresses. A WhoIs of this new bot shows that the domain cannot be resolved (yet).

It is possible that your log analyzer is not associating this new bot to be Googlebot. If it is relying on IP domain resolving to identify bots, then this is probably why. Most good log analyzers will not rely on the User-Agent string of the log to identify bots -- this is too easily spoofable.