According to Google, its bots are as follows: * Googlebot: crawl pages from our web index and our news index * Googlebot-Mobile: crawls pages for our mobile index * Googlebot-Image: crawls pages for our image index * Mediapartners-Google: crawls pages to determine AdSense content. We only use this bot to crawl your site if you show AdSense ads on your site. * Adsbot-Google: crawls pages to measure AdWords landing page quality. We only use this bot if you use Google AdWords to advertise your site. Find out more about this bot and how to block it from portions of your site. I've recently launched a couple of new sites in order (amongst other things) to improve landing page quality score. The only source of traffic is Adwords and I've not linked to these sites from any other sites. One of these sites seems to have been given a good QS (average ccp on the keyword has dropped from 15c to 8 - 10c.) On the other site, the ccp on the keyword is unchanged. Checking my stats, the only bot from Google that has visited these sites is Googlebot. This seems to indicate that Googlebot is visiting sites linked to only by an adwords ad. So is QS being determined by Googlebot? Has anyone else seen this or know anything about it? Thanks
Bots only crawl. They don't index, parse or process. They just fetch a copy of the output of the pages. Their internal systems will them do stuff to it, determining scores, indexing words an dphrases, computing PR etc. If Googlebot has fetched a page, AdsBot won't fetch the same one - saving you bandwidth.
Thanks TOPS. The question your answer brings to my mind is why, then, does Google have several different bots? If Googlebot alone sends back all the info required by the Adwords algo to score a page, why is there an Adsbot-Google bot at all? I began thinking that perhaps the Googlebot sends back enough info to allow a "rough" landing-page quality score to be calculated but info from the Adsbot-Google is needed to score the page accurately. Then I thought - what's the point of that? I don't think Google would want to send out a bot to enable a rough score to be calculated when it could send out a bot to do the accurate job. What I'm wondering is whether I need to see evidence of Adsbot-Google on a site for a definitive landing page quality score to be assigned or whether this can be carried out if only Googlebot is seen.
Tops is right on about the crawler, they also utilize the google toolbar information. Such as bounce backs.
It would send AdsBot if they have no recent enough cache or if you changed the ad - to double check. AdsBot is likely to come more often, if you manage your ads closely, than Googlebot. Googlebot is crawling from a different URL queue. AdsBot is probably purely triggered by AdWords activity.
Hmmm, I've just been checking a site I've advertised quite heavily on adwords for almost a year now. The only bot that Google has ever sent has been Googlebot. No sign of Adsbot-Google at all.