no Googlebot for April so far?

googlebot visits to site

[Tribewolf]

Checked my "in depth" site stats today for all of April and noticed 0 Googlebot visits so far.

So I started checking previous monthly data for the past year to see if Googlebot ever skipped my site for an entire month before. It's never happened. Normally I average 10 - 15 visits per day in a month. Concern would be an understatement.

Questions:

1. Has anyone here ever had this happen to them?

2. If it has happened to you, what was the eventual effect? Nothing? Banned? Normal activity the next month?

3. Has anyone noticed lower than normal visits to their site by Googlebot this month?

Thanks for any info.

[tedster]

The timing is suggestive. Google changed over to a new crawling pattern around the same time and every google crawler now participates in the "crawl caching proxy" where only one of the bots will crawl a page and the cache is shared around all of Google. This includes the AdSense mediabot, blogsearch, News crawl and possibly others -- see [mattcutts.com...] for more.

Is it possible your stats package is not configured to pick up all these new Google crawlers when they visit? I know mine wasn't.

[Tribewolf]

I was aware of possible recent changes to the crawling patterns. So I'm not in panic mode yet.

I've seen the numerous "dropped from the index" episodes over the years first hand and have learned that sometimes oddities happen and that they usually get worked out within a few weeks.

"Is it possible your stats package is not configured to pick up all these new Google crawlers when they visit?"

Yes, that is possible. It could also be that they are listed and I just don't know what they are.

My stats package doesn't have a specific "bots" category. I know when Googlebot visits because googlebot.com is in my visitor domains list. Does anyone know what domains the other bots might be using?

[phantombookman]

Google is a real mess at the moment, all you can do is just sit it out.
I hope this is a gradual reindexing thing they are doing and will take some time I guess