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Anyone here any idea how to stimulate the bot to visit again?
Sometimes we all have months with less Googlebot activity than we woudl like, Have you perhaps had some down time that may have coincided with a Google visit?
Last month my site was in a slightly similar situation. It started off really slow then picked up towards the end of the month. I think Googlebot is getting pretty smart at working out when your site is likely to change. If your server is using the "If_modified_since" header then this may cause Google bot only to index new content.
Try and not worry to much about bot visits. Has it effected your referals or have they remained the same.
Hope it works out.
Mack.
I just had a good look at my logs and Googlebot doesn't stop by anymore to crawl my site.
When you speak of visits it sounds like you talking about googlebot, not visitors. How's the traffic been?
Are new pages getting picked up?
[edited by: MrSpeed at 3:09 pm (utc) on Aug. 28, 2003]
For example, although I do add content--about a page per every three days (yes, during holiday season too)--the bot doesn't index it. My people's traffic has dropped to about 10% of what it was previously with MSN, now most important SE and Google only third place--used to be 1st place. When I look for the keywords I've used to optimize and which reflect what the site has on offer, I used to get #1 to 30 positions depending on the keyword. Now I'm nowhere near those anymore.
In June, when bot-visits and traffic was still high, I decided to use an invisible first paragraph (CSS: display=none) with some sentences (not single words!) describing what the site covers. On each page (well, sort of, some pages duplicated this paragraph) I used a different description with the same message (description of the site's content) in one sentence, and then a bit of an elaborate description of what is on the page (I used more keywords than in the running body text; using them in a journalistic article looks a bit odd to me) in another sentence. I've since (early August) removed these invisible div's as I saw no difference in the SEs that pay attention almost solely to content anyway. Last week, in a futile attempt to get G to visit me again, I have located the HTML-code-and-content of the first paragraph right below the body tag--with the CSS absolute positioning it doesn't make a difference for the visitor anyway (except for the 0.01 percent of older browsers that visit--ah, well, you can't win them all).
Also, it can't be that Google has penalized me, because using the tools7.com pagerank service (I'm on a Mac and haven't the pleasure of running the Google toolbar) tells me my PR is still at 5. My DMOZ listing of two weeks ago doesn't get in either--if it had, I would really be worried sick...
Another thing that strikes me as odd: I've posted an interview that immediately was linked to by 200 other sites. Those 200 inbound links are not reported by Google at all. G reports 19 links only--even without the 200 extra, I should be reported as having 50 inbound links (I follow them up...). For a while I was thinking Google perhaps was now into themes: the interview that I posted was only sideways related to the main topics on the site (it relates to the OS used by the target group).
onedumbear, I will certainly keep you posted of changes in indexing behavior by sticky--a BIG thanks for trying to help me this way!
