Unusually high number of Googlebot visits?

[dickbaker]

For as long as I can remember, Googlebots have crawled 200-300 pages a day on my site. Every so often the number would be higher, but not by much.

Lately, though, I'm seeing 600, 800, 1000 and even 2000 pages crawled on some days. I don't have a lot of new content, so I don't know why this is happening.

The timing of this is also odd because it coincides with a dramatic increase in the number of incoming links that Webmaster Tools shows for my site. Also for as long as I can remember, WMT showed about 4,000 to 5,000 external links. Now it's showing 15,000 or so.

Whenever Google does something unusual, I get scared.

Has anyone else been experiencing this?

[jdMorgan]

There has been a lot of activity by fake Googlebots recently, apparently coming from compromised servers. Double reverse-DNS lookups on their IP addresses will not resolve back to Google, so these are not legitimate.

However, if you've actually got more back-links, or if gBot has just recently uncovered a new batch of them, then you may just be seeing increased interest in your site from the real Googlebot.

In which case, feel free to link to my sites! :)

Jim

[dickbaker]

Well, the IP's resolve back to Google. I thought the IP addresses looked familiar.

[b2net]

One of my subpages was visited by the real Googlebot ~50 times yesterday and the day before. Usually Googlebot pays a visit once a week or so. But this Sunday morning it's all quiet again.