Did Googlebot Choke?

I'm seeing very little activity from googlebot so far this month

[akmac]

Did the Googlebot fill up after its November binge? I'm seeing that it's visits-though just as frequent-aren't hitting nearly as many pages.

My traffic and links from G haven't declined-neither have any of my pages been removed.

Is anyone else noticing this lack of activity?

Any ideas as to why?

I guess every page of every website is already indexed ;)

[BillyS]

akmac -

I was going to post the same thing. After a flurry of activity in early December, I have not seen googlebot except for a rare appearance.

From December 1 - 8 Googlebot indexed my entire site (around 400 pages) and was grabbing my home page daily (which is normal).

From December 8th up to now, Googlebot has grabbed exactly 1 page. There is some speculation that MSN will be announcing the new search engine on Monday, I wonder if Google is going to steal their thunder and roll something out too. Almost like the calm before the storm.

[walkman]

yeah. Been very slow expect today. Deep crawling going on

[Imaster]

Yeah, pretty slow this month.

I haven't seen a deep crawl on most of my sites, both old and new since 20 days.

Probably the bot's out on a vacation.

[steveb]

It was slow, and now is as busy as it has been in a couple months.

I certainly don't have enough info to be able to even make a reasonable guess, but from what I've read here, it seems sites that normally are lightly crawled got hit harder in the past few weeks while normally heavily crawled sites went down a lot. Things appear back more to normal now, although the last few days have been among the heaviest ever for me.

[Marketing Guy]

Had all my new content indexed over the past few days. Homepage is sitting with a Dec 10th date in SERPs and other content is listed with 11th Dec date.

Actually I've seen pretty constant indexing / updating for the past few weeks.

Scott

[markus007]

i'm seeing yahoo going nuts today over 60 pages a second being fetched currently.

[nzmatt]

I've never seen "yahoo going nuts"!

[nzmatt]

My Google activity has been a bit less this month, but stable.

[skipfactor]

>>I've never seen "yahoo going nuts"!

Yahoo! crawlers going nuts on my site [webmasterworld.com]

sorry couldn't resist :)

[nzmatt]

Lucky you - bet it's not a relatively recent site!

[markus007]

nope not recent, yahoo has fetched 200,000 pages in the last 11 hours. Google on the other hand seems to be missing in action.

[webnewton]

I bet it's due to the shoping season. Last year florida had hit all the top ranking site badly. I've a feeling that they're not doing any major update till the new year remembering the last years outcry.

[akmac]

Apparently G found my post-Googlebot was sitting below 9 other bots in terms of hits and bandwidth as of Saturday night-today they're back up on top. Seems like googlebot was just recovering from Thanksgiving and is beginning the Christmas binge. Yay Google!

[BillyS]

It is interesting to see what happens with these bots.

MSN constantly spiders my site, nearly every day grabbing about 10% of the pages. I'd call it bites. Kind of like a 3 meals a day spider.

Yahoo kind of nibbles all day long. Chipping away at all the pages.

Google is more of a pig. It hardly eats at all, but when it comes for a visit - about 3 times a month, it eats a lot at a each sitting.

The thing that bothers me about Slurp is that I only show 4 pages after changing my page name convention about 4 months ago. It grabs enough pages to index the entire site 5 times each month. I wonder what it does with all those pages? At least MSN and Google have them in the index (although it does me no good).

[Spine]

I have a few sites and I always wonder (probably wasting time) why it comes around to one site or another before the other during 'deepbot' time.