Googlebot with Referer

[dstiles]

Just noticed an odd googlebot hit:

IP: 66.249.71.nn
UA: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Referer: (Brazilian forumnow)
Target: example.JPG (which it failed to find because of an extra :80 in the URL)

The image has actually been linked to from the source site, probably illegally.

Anyone else noticed a referer going back to the source site? Can't say I recall a referer on any googlebot hit.

Note: this is googlebot not googlemedia.

[incrediBILL]

I've seen lots of googlebot referrers recently, didn't think much about it really, but it is nice to know where some links originate.

[dstiles]

It does imply that google is following external links from other sites - which we sort of knew but I'm surprised they are Referer'ing it.

[incrediBILL]

It could help track down bogus links that cause crawl errors if you know where they originate from, plus Google's WMTs is showing the source of bad links, so maybe it's related.

[dstiles]

Good points, Bill. Thanks.