Site Visits from Google's Employees?

[serenoo]

I received today 2 visits from Google.
The first at 04:20 p.m from Mountain View and the second at 06:15 p.m. from New York (I hope to do not receive the third). Both from Google organization.
My website is only in Italian so there is no chance that someone of their employees could visit it for his own interest.
I do not have google adsense. My website is clean with 20 pages full of text and I think I do not break Google's rules, but never say never.
No cloaking, no hidden text, no copy content, no backlinks spamming,...
I only have about 50 visitors everyday (all from google) so my website is not important. It is almost one year old.
I am very afraid. Do someone of you tell me why they are so interested in visiting my website?

[tedster]

It's probably nothing to worry about. There are all kinds of automated checks that happen as well as in person checks. If your site ends up ranking for a decent keyword, even for just a short time, you might well get a manual check.

Sometimes Google is working with a test algo that has not gone live anywhere yet - but they will manually check websites that rank for a set of test queries. Again, I'd say it's nothing to worry about.

[miozio]

See which operating system they used. It might as well be a preview bot. I see them visiting once in a while (not the bot), sometimes with up to 10 minutes length. As Tedster said, there is nothing to worry about and as you said yourself, there is nothing wrong with your site. Non ti preoccupare :)

[serenoo]

Operating System Other/Unknown
Browser Safari 3
Do you think it is not a person?

But I did not get a better ranking for a determinated keyword. I increased on 9 Nov and 10 Nov from 40 visitors to 80 visitors but for long tails queries and all differents.

[jecasc]

Perhaps they want to buy your website. Don't sell too cheap!

[bwnbwn]

Do you think it is not a person?

Nope it is the Google Monster ;) You ok bot activity besides if your clean why the sweating. HMM "determinated keyword" sounds like this was a target you happened to meet is there some funny business going on here?

[dstiles]

Check the User-Agent more closely. Safari is used as the preview bot. Does the UA include the phrase "Google Web Preview"?

The preview bot is coming in on at least three IP ranges here at the moment, sometimes on googlebot IPs but other times on no-rDNS IPs:

74.125.(mostly?)16.nn
72.14.(mostly?)194.nn
66.249.(mostly?)82.nn

[serenoo]

It still does not appear on my log stat files. I will check tomorow.
I found the google visit from my online thirdy part stats.
The second IP is 66.249.82.199 and I lost the first one from Mountain View.

[dstiles]

I have a posting in the "Search Engine Spider and User Agent Identification" under "Google Web Preview" giving the IPs I've trapped to date.

My comment above re: googlebot IPs is erroneous. They were google bots in the nature of translate and feedfetcher which I'd allowed but they had no true bot status and no rDNS.

[leadegroot]

I've seen the odd visit that looked like a 'real visit' from Mountain View - my site it clean and nothing bad happened. Don't panic :)

[htaccess]

Beginning in November, Google is visiting my site very deeply. I have 15 different sites, and it happens on every single site. Up to 78 pages per visit. I'm using adsense and analytics. What are they looking for?

[serenoo]

Another hit from 66.249.82.199
I am under the gun. :(

[dstiles]

All my items in the IP range 66.249.82.nnn are by the web preview bot.

[serenoo]

oh finally we discovered the secret. It is not google, but preview visitors!

[opmama]

New here - learning SEO, but web analytics I know. The important thing about this preview traffic is that as far as anyone seems to know, it isn't really "visitors". It's a bot that is managing to trigger GA tracking, and that currently, GA isn't filtering. It's single pageviews only, if you look at your GA data.

It may be an interesting tidbit to know about your site, but it isn't traffic by real people. I assume at some point Google will either filter this traffic from GA, or adjust their bot in some way so it isn't tracked. We're getting 2,000 "visits" a day right now from this, and I wouldn't want to have to explain a sudden traffic drop to clients, so I'm filtering it out now.