googlebot help

[paisley]

Hi, I have had a site for about 5 years. I have always been able to tell when the googlebot visited my site each month and my pages were always updated. Since Nov. 02, I have not had the googlebot show on my reports one time. This has freaked me out. I recently looked on search.cometsystems.com and it showed all the pages and I am able to see some have been updated even in the past few days. My site is very big and some pages have been updated and many have not been.
My question is why would it not show on my logs if the googlebot is coming? And if it is not, why would it of stopped after so many years of coming every month?
Any information is welcomed.
Thanks for any help. Paisley

[edited by: heini at 8:57 am (utc) on April 24, 2003]
[edit reason] removed url / thanks [/edit]

[Dreamquick]

Welcome to the forums Paisley! (I've always wanted to say that :) )

The site in your sig is actually in Google at the moment, so clearly the site is being crawled. Also the front page seems to be assigned a reasonable level of page rank (checked via the google toolbar).

Both of these suggest it has been crawled recently - plus if it wasn't in the index at all I'd expect to see a grey bar (I'm not an expert on this so if someone wants to correct me then feel free).

Are you saying that you're not seeing any GoogleBot activity in your raw logs (not site stats etc, but the raw log files), or are you saying that they aren't going very deep into your site?

- Tony

ps. You might want to remove the URL from your sig as rule #13 in the terms of service [webmasterworld.com] say your not allowed to do use URLs in sigs or even just drop them for self-promotion.

[heini]

Hi Paisley
Sound slike you have a problem with your tracking. If the pages are updated the bot must have visited you.
I would look into what tracking system is used and how it is configured to report Google bot visits.

[paisley]

Thanks for the information. I use web trends, which generates a daily report of all the stats about my site. This report for over the past 5 months showed me each time the googlebot visited my site. Then in Nov, and since Nov.02, it has not appeared one time. I called the my hosting company and Webtrends and they told me if it is not listing it, it is because it is not visiting.
I am so puzzeled because I can see new pages appearing in the google index, and so there has to be some activity.....correct?
I do not know anything about raw logs. When my site was set up, I was told it is almost impossible for an inexperienced person to make any sense from the raw logs. It was suggested to me to suscribe to a service that puts it in a report for me. And so that is what I did. It has worked perfectly for me and now I do not know what is going on in terms of when the googlebot comes.
I have a questions about the googletoolbar. I just installed it for the first time to see what it is all about. What info can you gather from the page rank? I only see a little bar that gets green in the bar. What does that tell you? How is this helpful?
Thanks for the note about not including the url. I am sorry, I thought I would have to tell you the url to help me out. I will refrain from that in the future.

[heini]

Paisley, ask your host how you can download your raw logfiles. It's nothing but very large textfiles. Open that in any text program and use the search function to find googlebot. If you find it you see on what dates it visited which files.

About the toolbar: visit this Google FAQ [webmasterworld.com]
You will find answers to virtually all basic Google related questions there.

[showdog23]

How do you know when the Google-bot came around?