What Is Google Proxy From Taft / Tracy, California?

[RedBar]

Checking my logs this morning I see lots of single page visits from Google Proxy from Taft / Tracy California, using loads of different IP addresses, different browsers, screen resolutions, operating systems, different machines etc.

All have come in from no referring link and supposedly most are from Taft and Tracy, California.

Simply loads of spam bots?

[not2easy]

I am seeing a lot of similar traffic with UA of Google's media-partners at various screen resolutions. I have not yet examined the access logs for the sites involved but on sites without AdSense, I have not seen any similar traffic.

I'm planning to take a closer look, but for today I have too many other things to deal with. If I can get a look today, I'll check into it and post if there is anything I can add.

[not2easy]

I did take a quick look and you may be correct about bots though they did seem to scrape everything including .js, .css and images. They held a particular fascination for a tiny background image (a 38 byte .png file) Most came from IPs in the 66.249.89.nn range.

The UAs listed "Mediapartners-Google" but clearly in a different way than I see from actual Google crawl ranges:

"Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.0.4; Galaxy Nexus Build/IMM76B) AppleWebKit/[WEBKIT_VERSION] (KHTML, like Gecko; Mediapartners-Google) Chrome/[CHROME_VERSION] Mobile Safari/[WEBKIT_VERSION]"

Some used:

"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko, Mediapartners-Google) Chrome/80.0.3987.92 Safari/537.36"

I'm sure that if you were to use our search here for '[WEBKIT_VERSION]' you'll find existing discussions. :(

[RedBar]

I've been reading up on this and apparently it's possible to use a Google proxy server through certain applications and, insofar as viewing this specific site is concerned, they have acted just like any regular visitor other than the fact almost all the pages seem to have been visited at exactly the same which is, obviously, an impossibility, literally several hundred pages all within 2 seconds of each other.

This seems more like a confirmatory visit to see pages exist prior to an update.

Anyone else with thoughts?

[not2easy]

There is a topic from last October regarding this "WEBKIT_VERSION" UA: [webmasterworld.com...] where it was seen coming from a Google Proxy range during a visit to preview where AutoAds would be inserted using AdSense and those "FILL In THE BLANK" UAs were recorded.

JorgeV:

With the new auto-ad feature, it's possible to preview where ads will be inserted into a page (and disable some spots).

[lucy24]

WEBKIT_VERSION

This one from earlier in 2019 is funnier, though:

[webmasterworld.com...]