Googlebot Behavior

Ok sheriff, we're gonna crawl ya, but we're gonna crawl ya slow...

[netmeg]

So I have a client who hosts with us who has been banned for some 21 months or so; he'd hired an overseas SEO who used some heavy duty link farms and other icky stuff, and they completely disappeared from Google's SERPS.

After cleaning the site up, submitting it to my sitemap account and requesting a review, the site was added back again last weekend. Great news! My client is falling all over himself happy.

The site has several thousand pages. The Googlebot *is* coming - but it's only picking up roughly 30 to 35 pages per day, and adding one or two per day to the index. This is contrary to my experience with the spider in the past - it usually hits all our sites pretty hard, and in fact in some cases we've had to ask them to throttle it back.

Note, I am NOT complaining in the least - my client is just happy to be invited to the party again - but I'm kind of wondering - are we on some kind of double secret probation as far as getting the site spidered?

Meanwhile, the Mediapartners Googlebot (which is the one they use for AdSense) hits the site something like 5000 times a day.

No robots.txt issues, or anything like that.

Just wondering.

[Phil_Payne]

This has been going on for a while.

I've had good success with the priority function of sitemaps. Many say it's not used, but it looks to me like the Googlebot is crawling my high priority pages frequently and the 0.1 pages infrequently if at all.

[texasville]

Google is doing some major reconstruction at the moment which might explain a lot. Seems to be general consensus that there will be a deep crawl and update soon.
From what I've seen from forum threads in the past your client might spring back to a true position in the serps as soon as this happens.