The Ad unit impressions on one of my channels are reporting 5 times the normal numbers. (Many thousands more than usual) No change has been made to the site and the stats don't show an increase in the number of visitors, site hits or bandwidth used. The only "weird" number shown by the stats is the number of visits made by MSNBot, which shows more than 10 times the number of hits that Googlebot shows. I also noticed a HUGE improvement on the position for my main keyword on MSN, but again, visits and page hits have not increased significantly. You think this huge increase in Ad unit impressions can be caused by MSNBot or is it just a failure in channel reporting? .
Are only the impressions increased or also the profit? If only impressions have increased it's likely that it's caused by a bot.
Only the impressions have increased. Profit is still normal for the day. Of course... CTR has also gone down to a fifth of what it usually is. That is what makes me suspicious of a bot too, but the weird thing is that bandwidth use has not increased significantly. .
bots do not use much bandwidth usually because the large files (downloads, images) aren't fully downloaded by all bots
That's very interesting. Perhaps MSN is downloading javascript files now. I wonder where this will lead to...
MSN doesn't download javascripts unless they are within the code of your page, because when it crawls the page it simply downloads the code to read it.... no SE bot does execute JavaScript though, at least I don't know of any that would.
Just FYI, it was a 1 day thing, and numbers have come back to normal. I still tend to believe it was just a problem with channel data, because many other people has reported massive visits done by MSNBot but none has reported the huge jump in Ad unit impressions that I experienced. .