Does toolbar share it's data with Googlebot?

[moltar]

I know that there was lots of speculation on Google Toolbar reflecting when Googlebot will visit new sites. I doubt it myself, but I was wondering if it has any other effects?

For example, toolbar can measure site's "popularity" like Alexa and send out googlebot accordingly.

Or it can check how much time people spend on the site to determine it's relevance to certain SERPs.

Does any of this make sense?

[korkus2000]

Uncertian, but I believe that when you turn on advanced features it says it won't share info with third parties, but not necissarily inside Google. I suspect that Google is collecting a lot of data from the toolbar, and is probably using it to make their services stronger.

[ukgimp]

my vote : yes

I have seen GB lurking around on a new site with no links and I have heard of many other times. But the word on the street from GG is they dont use the data.

If you read the privacy:

Periodically, the Google Toolbar contacts our servers to see if you are running the most current version. If necessary, we will automatically provide you with the latest update to the Google Toolbar.

[toolbar.google.com...]

You know they are doing it, so should we have a problem if they use the data? ;)

[moltar]

I don't know if it's a problem... Just interesting stuff :)

I also have brand new domain (never owned before) getting into index in few weeks with no links to it! I actually don't think I have even visited the site with Toolbar enabled anyways (but I could've).

I am wondering how did that happen? And it ranks #2 for the main keyword, but totally uncompetitive one, just a band name...

[ukgimp]

do you link to other sites? They may have open logs that show you as a referer.

[moltar]

No, I do not link to other sites. Well, I do link to one, but they for sure do not have open log files.

[zeb]

Oh yes, I believe the toolbar is very active!

I created a new page the day before yesterday. The page is really an online bill, so it isn't supposed to be indexed by se's and the code contains "NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" meta tags. After I had uploaded the page, I checked it with IE (toolbar on). Less than 16 minutes later googlebot visited the page! I hadn't even had time to send the url to my client!

[AjiNIMC]

same here, I had some pages which I removed from my site, and there were no links from any of my pages. But still google visited the page. I suspect the involvement of toolbar.

Aji

[Gabor]

This is interesting, I had the same happen to me. I guess the toolbar is active indeed.

[XtendScott]

I have worked on a NEW site for a client with no links to the site and little to no content. Google recently found the index page, I told the client google found them and they are working with me much better in getting the content. (its nearly complete now and waiting for the deep crawl).

Now I can work on the links and further optimizations.

[shasan]

I vote yes. There was some stuff on my site that googlebot crawled that had no business being crawled (hadn't updated the robots.txt).

After eliminating the impossible, the Google toolbar was the only suspect left. Besides, when turning on the advanced features, you do agree to sending site information to Google. I think it's fairly obvious.

<added>
I think it's going beyond conjecture now, we should try and get this settled once and for all :)
</added>

[panic]

I just started a brand new page with no backlinks, with a few outgoing links... and I checked it frequently (with Google Toolbar activated), and never got around to submitting it, but it showed up in the Google index somehow. However, I noticed that Google only indexed the homepage. Has this happened to any of you?

-p