Spotting a manual review

[kidder]

I just noticed a Mountain View IP running a fairly specific site: query on one of our subdomains. I checked the IP and it came up as Google. Does this sound like a manual review?

[Receptional Andy]

Why would a bot do a site: search for an "exact product name"

If it's a bot, the 'search' doesn't exist - it's just a spoofed referrer.

In any case, based on the tech data for these visitors, it's either a bot or it's a human using a very specific interface or tool.

800x600 screen res? Same parameters in every search, in the same order? Always XP/IE6? One page view per visit? I'm dubious ;)

[soxos]

Yeah - you are right on the user specifics - okay so if it is a bot - would this be any different to a normal spider?

more answers = more questions!

[Receptional Andy]

To clarify, by bot I mean that the visit is automated in some way, as distinct from a spider/crawler which retrieves a series of pages by following links. I know some would use bot interchangeably with crawler/spider, which this definitely isn't.

I still believe there is a connection with adwords and these visits, and I'm struggling to find data from this visitor on sites without any adwords history.

So, I still believe it's a semi-automated tool or a bot. A bot could, for instance, be related to the checking of landing page load times or a similar metric (whether you have the best landing page from your site, perhaps?). A semi-automated tool could be used by adwords staff for a variety of possible reasons. Of course, the true purpose of these visitors is impossible to determine without an additional data source.

In all honesty, to date, I've only been recording the activity as opposed to analysing it, so most of the above is pretty speculative at best ;)

[youfoundjake]

I have just come across this myself as well...
The address is [209.85.141.104...]
Showing up as a referral in my GA account.
I have recently been putting more time and energy into this particular site, including a article submission to over 600 article sites.
They first did a site search about a week back, and again I saw them poke their head in today...
I'm only seeing that they looked at one page (if GA is correct) and there was literally no time spent on the site.

I'm nervous only because this is a pretty competitive niche I'm in, and I sure would hate to have google ding me in rankings or penalties...

[g1smd]

Is it someone looking at an incoming link to their site, from your site, and following that referral back to your site, from their GA or WMT data?

[youfoundjake]

No, its like someone is doing. A search from a datacenter.
I'm going to have to review further but seeing a google address doing a site query on my domain makes me paranoid even though I have no reason to be.

[tedster]

In my opinion, any website that ranks top ten on a relatively competitive search query has already had a human editorial inspection, and probably several of them. So don't worry, be happy :)

[youfoundjake]

The kicker is that on google I'm not that high yet...but maybe I set off some flag in their lastest algo push if my site went from obscurity to top 10. That would be cool, however unlikely...

[Whitey]

Sorry folks - you're way ahead of me. Can you cover the basics so that some of us can catch up to your speed.

What are the ABC steps to identify a Google employee manually checking a site?

[youfoundjake]

For me, I was looking at my Google Analytics account and checking on how visitors were coming to my site, what search engine they used, and what the query was.
What raised an alarm for me was when I looked at the IP address as the referring URL and saw that it was a Google search page, I brought it up here to find out what would have caused that.
I think it was probably a site overlay that I used in Google Analytics to see the path people took, and the pages were viewed using a Google IP address which makes sense since I was using a Google product at the time...

[purple]

I have had a recent search for site:mysite.com the ip is 72.14.193.68 which comes out as

OrgName: Google Inc.
OrgID: GOGL
Address: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
City: Mountain View
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94043
Country: US

My reading so far puts it down to google web acclerator, but the site lost most of its google traffic in past week, and we were riding high in our key terms. So i am wondering if it be a manual review?

UPDATE

the ip address seems to relate to 72.14.193.68 PageFetcher-Google-CoOp;

what is this?