Google bombed or a spoofed attack?

23k+ spider visits today!?!

[Nuttzy99]

What the heck is going on? I'm currently seeing my 4th huge spike in visits from 64.68.83.7 (crawl31.googlebot.com). After receiving 1100 visits from the Googlebot all last month, I have 23k+ and rising TODAY. The latest was a 2Mbps spike with about 2500 visits to phpBB faq.php file.

The spike is still going on with a large number of visits to my login.php and index.php. If it's DoS, it's a bad one as it's not putting a dent in my server resources or bandwidth. The previous spikes were much smaller, averaging under a .5 Mbps for a couple hours, each.

I don't think it would be someone trying to brute force a password, as the phpBB site contains nothing of value.

So my question is, have others ever seen something like this? One thing I will say is that my site is about 3 months old and I'm expecting a pretty good size PR jump to certainly 6, maybe 7. But I doubt that has something to do with it.

Anyone?

Thanks
-Nuttzy

[Nuttzy99]

Just an update on this. After 4 spikes yesterday, I've not had one today. To me, it is looking less like a spoofed attack or something and looking more like Google just pounding my site for some unknown reason.

I think the spider had some brain damage or something ;-)

Anyone heard of something similar?

-Nuttzy

[whiterabbit]

One of my sites was closed down by my hosting company two weeks ago, they informed me that they'd had a DOS attack from the ip range 64.68.81.0-255

The site is running again now, but all googlebots are banned!

[jdMorgan]

If you're using session IDs, make sure you don't give them to spiders. A session ID, depending on how you implement it, can create millions of URLs for the same page, each seeming to be a unique URL.

Jim

[diamondgrl]

Sounds like it must be some kind session ID/spidertrap issue.

I have been getting that many hits (or more) from Google each day for the past two weeks. I'm pretty regularly seeing about 60,000 page views a day from various search engines. But I also have a lot of pages so it makes plenty of sense. Based on your description, it would appear you have a lot fewer pages and it is just repeatedly hammering individual pages. Correct?

[Nuttzy99]

That's sounds like exactly the problem. It was the same few pages over and over again, but the bot was probably getting different session id's. Totally makes sense, and I should be able to correct that.

Thanks!
-Nuttzy