jdMorgan - 2:28 pm on Sep 7, 2008 (gmt 0)

I recently added a 301 redirect to my root stopping any issues with the www.example.com./ , I wouldn’t have thought that this would have caused any huge requests for URL’s redirecting to 404 pages as a page that isn’t there just isn’t there. But I guess it might have channeled the Bot to recheck, I’m checking my 301 redirect logs now and so far haven’t come across any www.example.com./ 301 redirects landing to a 404 page.

This would not have "caused" Googlebot to do anything, since Gbot would have to request example.com./ in order to "discover" this redirect. Otherwise, the addition of this redirect is invisible to Gbot, since your server only responds to client requests -- There is nothing in a server that will "send a notice" to search engine spiders about such changes; How would the server know who to notify?

More likely Gbot is just checking through its historical "dead link" data for each of our sites, and in a few cases, might have found an obsolete link out on the Web somewhere.

It's interesting to me that they're doing this all at once in a noticeably-large "batch" -- So possibly there is some kind of clean-up or archiving process taking place.

Jim