dusky - 4:37 pm on May 1, 2010 (gmt 0)

1script, yes all IPs are of the crawl-66-*-*-*.googlebot.com type and if others were used they are all RDNSed to G* mountain view.

So, to everyone with the "long tail traffic algo change" theory, I have joined your club. Further to that, is there a correlation between gbot massively increased activity and loss of traffic, that is, while the traffic is at 10-50% of its usual, DEPENDING ON YOUR SITUATION gbot is busy hitting your sites, I appreciate this one question survey!

The list starts with:
dusky,
steerpikegg

steerpikegg, myself are definatly on agreement on the above, any others! I'll wait for few replies so I don't have to quote myself over and over again and update the list here.

Although my hand is on my heart and sometimes my two hands are catching my sunken face, I am trying to look at this positively, meaning some good will come out of this, likely to be they are deep crawling the millions of pages and that takes time, whereas before they stopped at 100k for example and dumped the rest because of shortage of infrastructure space, a problem they hopefully solved with caffeine. In the meantime and while re-indexing and recalculating PR, those sites are put on hold somewhat (as I pointed out before) for their long tail (stored in the new structure waiting to be released once all is re-indexed), hence the gbot high activity!
For me, this happened the third time in two months (March-April), twice they recovered after less than 5 days, now its the seventh day and not yet!

As long as you know there was nothing fishy done on those sites and completely white hat, you can add yourself to the list of the shrinking long tails theory, if that's the case for you!

I did not call May Day on this, but looks like it literally came whether I liked it or not, see the date of this post :(!