timwestla - 10:24 pm on Jul 16, 2007 (gmt 0)

Bill:

I never really thought this was a newsworthy item...

I think it's interesting :)

I wouldn't say that this activity is so large it's a problem for AdSense yet but I'm wondering if they're having any overall impact and what, if anything, Google is doing to filter out the obvious sources of this activity from our stats.

My guess is that it does impact the stats, but the effect is minimal and probably worth the extra vistors that the search engines bring to my site.

As for the smaller sites... it's possible that website traffic is taken into account. My guess is that low traffic sites aren't getting cached. As a test, I checked my employer's website. We don't focus at all on web traffic, and have done nothing to promote the site. We average a whopping 20 page views per day :) Our site didn't show up at all at ask.com, and at Alexa, the snapshot image is a placeholder that says "picture coming soon."

pontifex:

Then I will send my robots to look at it :)

LMAO!

Oops! Can I say "A" on here?