Why is Mediapartners wandering around?

[BlueSky]

I have a site which I've been actively working on and traffic has been steadily growing. I have not yet applied for Google's AdSense Program as I've been trying to build content and visitors first. Today, I noticed in my logs Mediapartners came by and took my robots.txt and homepage.

Is the little sucker supposed to be wandering off like that? His brother Googlebot comes by almost every day, but I thought Mediapartners would be way too busy indexing participants' pages. Anyone know why he's checking my site which is not in the program?

[chiyo]

Hmm.. just putting two and two together with the Opera Adsense threads. Maybe mediapartners visits pages that Opera users visit? Maybe this is just one example, and there are other cases where a page is "Adsensed" not by the owner, but a second party like the Opera arranagement with google?

[jimbeetle]

I was wondering the same thing a few days ago until I saw the thread on the new Opera release (wherever it is). The free version shows ads and the user has a choice between Adsense banners and traditional graphic banners.

(By the way, Opera and Adsense ads are a great way to see how a page is tweaked for relevance.)

So, if somebody visits your site with Adsense-enabled Opera the bot will be paying a visit.

Imagine it would be the same situation if you're running Adsense ads through a broker like Fastclick. Not sure of the other products out there, must be a few more. G and adsense seem to be everywhere right now.

<adde>I don't think it took me six minutes to write this, but chiyo said basically the same thing first<added>

[BlueSky]

Ooooh okay thanks, I'll go hunt down the Opera thread then on it.

[richmondsteve]

I have a site which had AdSense enabled on hundreds of pages until about a month ago when I removed it from all but a single page. I did so for testing, but ultimately left AdSense off the rest of the pages because the vast majority showed PSAs due to what I consider to be a flaw in Google's algorythms.

The Apache logs show Mediapartners continues to visit pages that haven't shown AdSense in a month though. It's possible it's possibly related to Opera users with AdSense enabled, however some of the URLs have only been visited by Mediapartners in the last month and some of the URLs are regular pages with a unique query string appended (as in something like?foo=bar) and I am quite sure I'm the only one who ever entered those URLs (more than a month ago when I was doing some testing).

So my evidence suggests that Mediapartners continues to make periodic visits to URLs which had previously displayed AdSense. I don't know how long or how often Mediapartners visits such pages since I haven't done a thorough study and it may keep visiting the pages for months.