drall - 8:18 pm on Jun 16, 2010 (gmt 0)

Ok now I am getting really wierded out. I thought hmm maybe they are ramping up mediabot as the primary crawler as was mentioned since we have adsense on the sites this would make sense.

I go and grep out all of the mediapartners-google lines in my log and see a few of the tens of thousands that are on obviously different ip addies.

I trace them back and they lead to Microsoft Corp?

Microsoft is spoofing Mediapartners-Google? The crazy drop in indexing started less then 1 hour later. I see how your friend came up with Bingbot-Googlebot going out on a date. This is really getting strange now.

These IP addies are showing in my logfiles labeled as Mediapartners-Google

65.55.218.36
65.55.215.168

Less then 1 hour later almost all regular GBOT activity dies.