log entry

is googlebot coming and going

[Steve_w]

my site is not at the moment being indexed. I have recently changed hosts and googlebot came did one hit then left that was 4 days ago. Whilst looking in the logs for the last 300 visits there was this entry

Host: 66.249.71.40 /robots.txt
Http Code: 404 Date: Apr 09 09:37:08 Http Version: HTTP/1.0 Size in Bytes: -
Referer: -
Agent: Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)

¦
¦
¦
/%20
Http Code: 404 Date: Apr 09 09:37:09 Http Version: HTTP/1.0 Size in Bytes: -
Referer: -
Agent: Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)

I dont have a robots file. but I dont know why it would look for /%20

Please can you tell me if this is googlebot and what it means

[ThomasB]

Steve, first of all welcome to WebmasterWorld!

Googlebot follows most links on a site. Saying that I think it might have happened that you put up a link to "/%20" somewhere on your domain. But it could also be well possible that the link goes to "http://www.example.com/ " and the space gets urlencoded to "%20" and followed by the spiders.

[Steve_w]

Thankyou for your reply.
I pleased to say Googlebot has come back and is still hiting away now. I have searched for a link with a missing space but couldnot find it. Previously I did not have a robots file so I decided to include one, I know many people say it should make no difference, Coincidence or not googlebot seems happy. Any idea on the lenght of time after he visits to inclusion back into search engines?

Steve

[ThomasB]

Time to be listed in the SERPS is usually somewhere betweenn 18 and 72 hours, but can take up to 1 week. So be patient and work on improving your site while waiting. :)