Very long visits from Google Inc.

12 hour visits!

[rmphoto]

For the past couple weeks one of my sites has been getting extrememly long visits from Google Inc. Im talking 10-15 hour visits each day.

They are coming from either no referring link, or coming from one backlink I have on someones page...

Ive never seen this before. Why is this happeneing and what does it mean?

[jomaxx]

What's your site about? What do your logs tell you about what the person was doing? Are you reasonably sure it's a human being rather than a spider? Given nothing to work from, I'm not sure how WE can tell you anything useful.

[potentialgeek]

It could just be they landed on your page and kept the browser open, then moved on to something else. Obviously they're not goofing off for the entire day.

I wouldn't read too much into it unless your SERPs suddenly drop
(e.g., manual penalty).

p/g

[htaccess]

I saw the same visits from google.inc on 2 new sites I have published in the last weeks.

Because I use google analytics, I could identify them very easy. Visitor comes from Mountain View, California, Provider = google.inc, Browser = IE, System = Windows.

Both visits where very short, only 1 page each.

[Simsi]

I've been getting them a few times over the past few weeks too as it happens. Not for 12 hours tho lol.

[WiseWebDude]

Well I see Google Spider on my forum ALL day EVERY day, and I can even watch it going to different threads every minute...cool by me!

;)

[Bewenched]

doing the same to us, generally about 8 hours a day on our very large site.

[BradleyT]

Suprising to see google employees using Internet Explorer. I thought all the cool kids use Firefox.

(BTW I use Internet Explorer).

Just checked company site for Mountain View visitors. 9 visits last month, 8:1 ratio IE:Firefox and 100% bounce rate - woohoo.

[edited by: BradleyT at 5:11 pm (utc) on Nov. 9, 2007]

[jomaxx]

I just checked my logs and found 20 separate visits from the same Googleplex IP address, at different times and using a variety of different referrers. Maybe it's the search quality team doing their thing, or maybe it's just people going about their business.

My best guess for what the OP is seeing is that his stats program interprets this sort of thing as one continuous session. It's hard to believe anyone at Google is spending 10 hours a day, every day, on the same website. I'm sure that if they were looking for evidence of cloaking or paid links or whatever, they wouldn't spend more than about 10 minutes on a site before moving on.

In any case, all the answers should be in the site logs.

[rmphoto]

hey guys,
i think the above post is right, the stats are just showing it as one continuous visit. some of them come from actual people at google, and some look like bots.

just a note, the people from google inc on my site are using msie6.0 and using windows 2000. they couldnt spring for xp. most of the visits are from new york.