Googlebot, why hast thou forsaken me?

Bot appears to be getting lethargic.

[WebFusion]

Hello all,

I'm the proud owner of a rather popular PR7, 100% original content-based website that is on the receivning end of one-way links from prestigious places such as several .edu sites, the Wall Street Journal, and USA today, just to name a few.

The site is rarely without a crawler from one of the threee majors on it, with Yahoo/slurp and MSN Bot exhibiting particularly voracious appetites.

Having said that, for the last 60 days or so, Googlebot has acted like an undecided browser at the local library, stopping in to grab a handful of files from my virtual shelves and leaving....not to return again for 12-24 hours.

Prior to this period of lethargic crawling, google's various bots had been VERY active with the site, grabbing any new article posted within hours (or in many cases minutes)...yet of late it seems to have lost it's appetite for new content (at least from this particular site).

In bound links are not a problem (there are over 2,000 one-way links from high quality sites alone), nor is any of the usual issues complained about here (dup. content, thin affiliate, etc.)

So my question is....how do I get googlebot's Mojo back?

[stinkfoot]

Same problem here .. for 4 months now ... when it forgets about you it really forgets about you ... googles responce is ... get some more links coming in .. doesnt work

best of luck mate

[webdude]

WebFusion,

Are you using SiteMap? I noticed some changes on one of my sites since using it. I am wondering if it is related...

[WebFusion]

We are using google's sitemap service (although we've always had a spider-friendly site, with our own sitemap since day one), but it hasn't changed/increased googlebot visits (aside from the Mozilla-flavored version, which doesn't seem to make much difference).

[BillyS]

It's strange that you should mention this WebFusion. I had a very active month in August - 7,800 grabbed by Googlebot on a site with 980 pages.

Through the first 6 days of this month, it took in another 852 (I just looked). The site is a PR 5, with just a couple of outstanding links (not as many as you describe).

New content always shows on my home page - so Google ususally picks up the new page and ranks it within days. I think you've got a better site than mine, so I'm not giving you any advice. Just letting you know that Googlebot was very active on my site in the last 3 weeks.

[JuniorOptimizer]

Maybe Googlebot decided all your quality one way links weren't natural and you picked up a penalty.

[walkman]

>> Maybe Googlebot decided all your quality one way links weren't natural and you picked up a penalty.

at one point I had a penalty on one of my sites and that's what happened. Was getting 5-20 max visits a day. Now it's hundreds.

[stinkfoot]

>> Maybe Googlebot decided all your quality one way links weren't natural and you picked up a penalty.

Oh the irony .. lol

If anyone here has a professional site that is ranked in the top 20 results of google for any competative keyword phrase of 2 or 3 words please state so now!

[stinkfoot]

Oops forgot to add ...

If they have done NOTHING to gain incoming links :)

[WebFusion]

Maybe Googlebot decided all your quality one way links weren't natural and you picked up a penalty.

Nope....no purchased links, no shadow domains, hell...we don't even do a link exchange.

Anyhoo...it's just a curious occurance. The site still gets 1000's of visitors from google/yahoo/msn, so no worries there. I was just curious.