Google snooping at my sites with + between keywords? Manual Penguin?

[Oimachi2]

I've seen in my logs that Google is hovering around my sites adding + between keywords.

Something like this:

blue+cheap+widgets

Looking at the logs it's from MOutain view with Google ISP, seems to be a human because I know what screen resolution, browers and operating system he is using.

Could this be proof that penguin is a manual penalty and Google staff is monitoring sites by hand?

The sites they are "visiting" are hit by penguin.

[Oimachi2]

this user agent (IE 7 w/ 1024/768 resolution and mountain view ip) is the typical user agent for the adwords landing page quality review bot (sorry for that name, I dunno the real one ;)

I have no Adwords campaigns running, I tried breifly a couple of weeks after Penguin but conversion was abysmal...so paused the whole account, not Adwords either ;)

[jimbeetle]

Oimachi2, what about nettulf's post saying that it related to G+?

[wolv23]

I also have stat counter and saw the same keyword+keyword+... in my stats, it was right after I contacted AdWords about a new campaign that I created and was still waiting for approval.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

If it was manual it likely wouldn't have come from their California IP. Google hires 3rd party companies around the globe for their manual inspection work.

[b0rg]

Strange, I plus'ed some of my pages today. First I saw the usial hits from Google Plus reading the pages. Then after 2 minutes I saw exactly what is described above here in Statcounter: Two visits from different Google IPs according to Statcounter (located in Council Bluffs, Iowa and Lappeenranta, Finland). Both hits were within the same second, using search queries with plus sign (%2F), relevant search term for the site but not for the page visited, and searching via google.com. What is interesting is they do not show up in Analytics, but a similar search query I did just afterwards is showing in Analytics... what can that mean?

this is just google data centers from council bluffs and finland

i seriously don't know how any of you can determine anything out of this, google data centers constantly visit websites that rank for terms.

a good majority of the time its just an automated bot visiting, and occasionally you can see what looks like erratic human behavior following the bot from the same source.

and yea any links getting dropped on of course google websites will often see an immediate or soon after visit from google data centers somewhere in the world.

it does really make you wander though "who" and "why" when you see what looks like an actual employee or agent come after the bots on some occasions.

i can confirm i have seen many

i can also confirm - that they are absolutely evil, and censorship thrives in our world

their data centers go bat#*$! crazy when you expose things they don't want you too.. :) it's quite interesting to watch sometimes

[Panthro]

They like to visit one of my sites with a domain name search (with the "www"). Guess it's just an Adsense bot.

[BaseballGuy]

<obviousguy>Perhaps a Google employee was on his/her lunch break and decided to search for "blue widgets" to buy when they get home</obviousguy>

[Jez123]

I am seeing the same as well. Exactly the same and it is odd.

[Panthro]

@Jez123 - Same as OP?

[Jez123]

Yes, I have kw1+kw2+made+solid+material

as well as kw

and kw+kw

And 3 other similar ones over the space of just over 1 hour

In my case they were all exact match page titles (apart from the top one which omitted the word "from"

[Panthro]

Hm. Mine started the day before Penguin refresh (5/25/12) and it's an EMD.

[Jez123]

Also, I should point out that the statcounter data shows that the person found me at #1 for ridiculously difficult single word searches as well.

[tedster]

Jez, that sounds like a human quality rater checking out an unreleased algorithm change - or at least you can hope so, right ;)

[jadebox]

"... with plus sign (%2F) ..."

That's a slash. The ASCII value of a plus symbol ("+") is 2B.

[Panthro]

Yeah, this is weird. Shared a page on G+ today, got the visit from Mountain View with a search term with "+" separating each individual word. The term, while relevant to a couple other pages on the site, is nowhere to be found on the page I shared nor in the G+ post.

[atlrus]

Well, you guys peaked my interest, so I looked in my StatCounter logs and I got some of that weird stuff too :)

From Mountain View's Google I have a visit with keyword "blue+widgets", which StatCounter shows as #1, but the landing page has nothing to do with blue widgets, nor is it at the #1 spot. StatCounter also says " This user was automatically redirected from google to your site..."

Really weird. I wish I could find a way to see why did google redirected the user to that particular page for the blue+widget keyword, considering the page has nothing to do with that search, nothing at all.