Adsense Bot visited 2 sites... but I don't run adsense on those sites!

[whatcartridge]

I was checking the AWStats for my sites today, and lo and behold 1 site had 1 visit from the Adsense bot, and another site had 2 visits from the Adsense bot. These 2 sites do not run Adsense!

They appeared in the AWstats log under Robots/Spiders visitors as "Google AdSense" with a last visit of 11 Apr 2006 - 03:01, but when I went to check the server logs the logs only went back one week so I couldn't get the IPs.

Of course AWStats may have got it wrong or maybe someone was spoofing the Adsense bot but I am going to keep my eyes open for any more visits so I can grab the IP.

If it is the Adsense bot I will be surprised, although Jensense speculated that the Mediabot does double duty as a crawler on some pages, but not under these circumstances.

[sem4u]

I have seen this before as well with more visits this month. Maybe they are spidering sites they want to run AdSense?

[netmeg]

I had a site that I host that I suspected was banned because they hadn't had any Google traffic for 22 months. (Turned out they were - a previous SEO had done some black hat and gotten them kicked out) I went back over the logs and found no regular Googlebot traffic whatsoever. However, the AdSense Googlebot was hitting them a steady 3000-5000 times per day. Now, they do have AdSense on a page, but the weird thing was that they have several thousand automobile images on the site, and the AdSense bot was actually fetching the *pictures* as well as the pages. I mentioned this over in the AdSense forum, and someone from Google contacted me and asked to provide log files so they could figure out why it was happening. I did this about six weeks ago - but they never got back to me on what was going on. And it's still coming - 7064 visits yesterday.

[sem4u]

That sounds very strange. Why would it take the images?

[netmeg]

No idea. I suspect that Google had no idea either, which is why they wanted to see the log files. But I inquired back and never got a reply, and it's still happening.

[rebelde]

Somebody running adsense probably showed your page in a frame. That's my theory.

[zCat]

It could also be someone with an older Opera version (8.0 or earlier, I think); the free versions had AdSense banners built in; and visiting sites with Opera would often trigger a Mediabot.

[jenkers]

could be someone using the adsense preview tool on your pages. I do this occasionally if I see a site I like the look of purchasewise i.e if the content looks good and the subject matter is right and I think I might send the owner a speculative offer.