Mysterious 404's

Early Activity on Developing Site is Wierd

[Gruntled]

My site has been "live" for a couple of months. I am still developing it--sometimes on my test server and sometimes on the live server. I don't even have a robots.txt file yet.

Googlebot recently crawled the site for the first time, after which I found queries for pages within my site that did not exist. I realize it's total speculation, but would love to have feedback on what people think could be going on.

First there were these:

../IslamicReformers.php
../Manifesto.php
../SundayProgram.php
../ReformedIdeas.php

The Dept. of Homeland Security, maybe?

Then there were these:

../info.php
../archives.php
../FAQ.php
../PressRelease.php
../ContactUs.php
../test.php

Could this be the bot? A hacker? Someone trying to scrape my content?

I'd appreciate any thoughts on the matter.

[Receptional Andy]

You should check the IP(s) that made those requests via your server log file. That way you can verify (via reverse DNS) if it belongs to a search engine crawler. That would help diagnose the problem.

If your domain name (or IP) was previously used by someone else they could be pages that used to exist on the site.

[Gruntled]

Is there a way to research ownership history of my domain name? I'm fairly certain that it's original and never been used before, but I'd be interested in verifying that.

[encyclo]

First step for verifying whether a domain name has been used before is to check with archive.org:

[web.archive.org...]

You should see a previous site cached by their service.