Hi all, I've been seeing these patterns for awhile now (couple months) and I'm wondering what to make of it (if anything, really).
just wondering if it's just me or someone else can see the same thing.
So, here goes:
I'm using Visitors stats software that is able to produce a report on latest N visits by Googlebot. I usually have it on 1,500 just for fun. The pages visited by Googlebot are listed from most recent down (i.e. sorted by time in descending order). Every once in a while I'm seeing a block of requests (approx. 300 URLs at a time) that starts with one of the shortest URLs on the site, say, 12 characters after the domain name, then gathers quite a few other 12-char-long URLs, then goes to 13-character long ones and gathers a bunch of those, then 14-char-long and so on until the length becomes random again after a couple hundred URLs have been gathered by simply adding 1 to the URL length. The only thing that connects those URLs gathered sequentially is the length in characters. They can be in different directories, can be content pages, listing pages, category pages - anything, really, as long as the length of the URL is the same.
Or, and I've almost omitted probably the most important detail: the sites that get their URLs gathered in such a methodical way usually have better standing in Google than very similar sites. By better standing I mean percentage wise more people are coming from Google to these methodically harvested sites than from other sources. I also mean: "better at the time such Googlebot visits happen". I needed to clarify that because I have sites that experience yo-yo effects and while they are on the downswing,URLs harvested by Googlebot appear to have completely random lengths, when they are on the upswing, I see those sequential blocks sometimes.
Anyone else sees a similar thing happening / knows what to make of it / finds a correlation between these strange visits and Google ranks?
