Is this a Google Employee viewing my site...

I'm not paranoid...well, maybe just a little.

[Webdoc]

Hello,

Is this a Google Employee viewing my site:

216.239.35.5 - W3SVC557 216.15.194.5 80 GET / - 200 0 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+5.01;+Windows+NT+5.0) - -

or some sorta cache thing?

I have had this show up on a few of my sites several times a day. I have read many posts here and try to make my pages relevant to user searches and not engage in any spamming.

Signed,

Paranoid in Paradise

TIA

[Brett_Tabke]

Sure is. They have 500+ employees. They all do something...surfing sites for fun and profit...

[Webdoc]

Well, why don't they buy anything then? :)

Actually, I'm new to the web developer/seo world. I have 10 or so sites and do link SOME of them to eachother's main page where appropriate. I also have relevant incoming links from sites other than mine.

I wrote about being paranoid...well, probably because I read some posts here about being penalized for crosslinking but I feel I don't have anything to worry about.

I try to remeber what I read what seems to be the motto here:

KEEP THE SEARCHES RELEVANT

Well, hopefully Google Guy will get the word out, "Surf Less, Buy More!"

:)

[Terry_Plank]

You want your sites searched and found by everyone. Google is not the bad guy, they are just a search engine doing a job trying to provide a great product so they can make a profit. Be happy with everyone that finds you. :-)

[Brett_Tabke]

I think the thing to remember is that se's by-n-large surf more sites by hand than most of us realize. If 100 people check 2500 pages a day (easily done, but mostly out of the cache), that's 250,000 pages a day or 5-6million pages a month.

Kinda explains a few of those pr0's eh?

[Webdoc]

Yes, sure does!

[Webdoc]

Oh, the reason I wasn't dure if it was a web viewer vs. cache or something was because it only showed index.html WHEREAS when others view the page, the graphics are loaded...Oh, maybe they have graphics turned off?

[danny]

I think 2500 pages a day is way more than one person can check - unless the criteria are incredibly simple, in which case they'd be better off automating.

I doubt more than 1000 sites a month are manually "checked"
by the folks at Google... the rest of the traffic will surely be them doing research, or just goofing around.

[mayor]

Hey, and even at 5-6 million pages a month, in a year that's only 60 or 70 million, or about one fiftieth of what they have indexed.

I'd say they have to focus on the snitch reports and maybe they've got a snitch bot looking for WebmasterWorld members'pages :)

[brotherhood of LAN]

Even if they don't view the amount of pages that Brett suggests, some pages may be so spammy on a site they can assume that the rest of them are spam.

i.e. they visit (fictional) spam.com and find spammy pages....they remove all their pages from the index...say 10000.

They have now "checked" 10000 pages ;)

[loanuniverse]

I just checked your site... are you sure they weren't there to buy something? :)

[bird]

I see Google manual checks several times a week on a PR6-7 site of 400 pages, with an average number of 2.5 requests per day. They usually come visiting two apparently random pages at a time, without loading any images. The requests don't include a referer, and don't follow any of the typical human visitor patterns.

What this most likely means is, that there are indeed people sitting in the 'plex that do nothing but look at pages that are served them randomly by some prompting software, all day long, year in and year out.

I don't know if it makes sense to extrapolate those numbers to other sites. But at least we can assume that on this type of site (completely harmless and innocent), there's a chance that most pages get checked at least once a year. And that's just the obvious checks, as I only did a very cursory scan through my logs right now.

[roscoepico]

Do you do any Ad Words promotions? We've attributed some of those visits by that ip/ua to be employees checking our Ad Words listings.

[Webdoc]

DUH! To me,

Yes,

I've subscribed to Adwords with both sites that were visited frequently...makes sense.

Brett, please don't ban me from Webmasterworld...I promise I'll get more sleep!

[qball0213]

Hmm in the last 81 days, I've had 1227 requests from 216.239.39.5, 40 some today. Man I wish I wouldn't never read a webmaster discussion board, ignorance really is bliss. I don't do adwords, btw, I have an account but it's not active.

[Brett_Tabke]

>I think 2500 pages is way more than one person can check

I average 4000 page views a day here and we have a few members in the 2000-2500 area and several dozen in the 1000-1500 a day. Many of those are on dialups.

Surfing out of a local disk cache checking for simple page problems? 2500 a day would be gravvvy.

[ciml]

Webdoc and qball0213, those footprints are from Google translate. Check your logs for the hits just after that IP and you'll probably see people loading the images with a [Google IP address]/translate_c?... 'referer'.

As Brett points out, Google could hand check a lot of URLs for spam purposes if they wanted. I doubt that we'd see them in our logs due to the cache, so I do wonder why the real internal IPs crop up now and again.