GoogleBot visit to an unfinished, unlinked to site

[hobbnet]

Hey,
I have been developing a new site the past couple weeks with my cousin. We have barely even scraped the surface of the content work to be done on the site.

But since it is a two man project and we are located hundreds of miles apart we upload all our work to the actual domain so we can share each others progress. We have yet to solicit any links and when doing a 'link: mysite' search on google it shows no links to my site.

Yet, when I look at my logs I see a visit from googlebot 2.1

I'm sure this has been adressed before but I couldn't find the thread in search.

Since their are no links to my knowledge my only answer would be that google found my whois information. Or since i visit my site with a browser which has the google tool bar installed, maybe they are using the tool bar to find new, unindexed sites (i hope this is untrue)

How did that lil bot find my site?

[PsychoTekk]

maybe they are using the tool bar to find new, unindexed sites (i hope this is untrue)

hi hobbnet,
the toolbar does send the URI of any page you visit with IE and toolbar
to google. some months ago there were discussions about this topic - use the
search function of webmasterword if you need more detailed info

<added>
try this:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[Mohamed_E]

A few comments:

1. We get this thread more often than once a month, so my take is that the problem is at least moderately widespread.
   
2. Both the Google FAQ and Googleguy point out that "security by obscurity" does not work. There are dozens of different ways in which a site which allegedly has no links can actually have them.
   
3. A few months ago Googleguy wrote [webmasterworld.com] (msg #33, please how do I write the URL to point to the specific message?):
   
   • To the best of my knowledge, the toolbar is not currently one of those ways a url becomes known.
     
   • It's my personal, unofficial belief that using toolbar data in the future to augment our crawl is not only a good idea, but specifically allowed by the original policies we posted.
     
   
   

[NFFC]

<offtopic> add #msg33 after the .htm </offtopic>

[hobbnet]

Well, then after reading all those posts the only way I can think of google finding my site is through WHOIS info since googlebot it was clearly stated as of now googlebot does not follow the google toolbar aroound...

[tlhmh1]

That's a good point. Does Google follow WHOIS records?

[jimh009]

I'm pretty sure Googlebot doesn't follow WHOIS. I had my site up beginning in May - quite large with lots of blank pages and no links. Google didn't find it until August (after I submitted it and got listed in ODP) and it didn't appear in the index until October.

My guess is that someone somewhere might have linked to your site. Perhaps its your web host - do they have a file somewhere that lists all sites hosted on their server or something? Maybe a friend heard of your site and put a link to it on their own?

Just some ideas.

Jim

[jomaxx]

I just created a new a few days ago. I looked at the beginning of the log file, and lo and behold Googlebot was crawling it before there was anything there.

I'm also reasonably sure Google could not have found about the site via the toolbar. I did go to the site last week to make sure it resolved OK, but I normally surf with Netscape.