Google Worm Implications

How will the Microsoft SQL Exploit Worm affect GoogleBot?

[Napoleon]

It's not so much the sites being down for customers.... but with a re-index around the corner, what about GoogleBot?

Will:

a) Sites not available suffer in the next index?
b) Links from missing sites be excluded from PR/etc calculations?
c) Googlebot simply get bogged down in the bandwidth struggle, creating no overall effect?
d) Google call him home until the problem is manageable?

I'd like to think that Google would reduce what is already a pressure situation by temporarily halting the crawl. Are you around GoogleGuy?

Any views from anyone on the above? I personally reckon (c)... but boy, I'd love confirmation.

[EquityMind]

My guess would be a delay on the crawl until the situation can be resolved. Think about all of the yelling around here if the serps went haywire and relevancy was out the window.

[BigDave]

packet loss is almost down to normal levels right now. If your site wasn't infected with the worm, there should be no problems. Most ISPs are blocking the packets now, so by the time the crawl starts, things should be just fine.

<added>and if your site was infected with the worm, you deserve to be out of the index</added>

[rfgdxm1]

I'd guess that Google would just ignore all of this. My sites are hosted on Linux boxen. Possibly unreachable for a while for some, but still up.

[Napoleon]

>> by the time the crawl starts <<

Unfortunately it has been underway for some time.

And yes, I do have sites affected, plenty of them... and they are still down... hence my post.

[BigDave]

You should look into a new hosting service if they are still down. None of the normal sites I go to are currently down.

I have seen hits by freshbot, but there isn't a crawl going yet. The deep crawl was done with my site by the 10th

[Brett_Tabke]

Oh, they will probably throw all the sites hosted on IIs out of the database ;-) (duck).

hehe

They'll have to throw out the errors from last night, just throw out last night, or press the restart button and recrawl all of the urls crawled last night. No other way to do it.

Reassuring [seattlepi.nwsource.com].

[msr986]

> Reassuring.

Only if you're MS.

[BigDave]

It's reassuring to hear that some of these products no longer sell themselves. That means the MS name is showing a little tarnish, even to the suits.

[yankee]

The only bot out last night was freshbot, not the deep crawler. No big deal.

[onionrep]

I too was afected by this.

Although my sites are hosted on a unix server the fact that there were 2 co-located win2k (non patched) servers on the network, meant that the whole network fell when the attack started.

Ive seen a drop in serp postions at www2 and www3 but its early days, so im not sure if its down to this episode or something else, only time will tell.

Just goes to show how careful you have to be when choosing your hosts.