I was checking many of my affected sites and most (but not all) are seeing a huge amount of googlebot hits. Most sites seeing several thousand hits today so far. I can only hope this is a good sign. What is interesting is I emailed the bostonpubcon email address listed at WMW for a chunk of 4 sites hit bad and they are being spidered the heaviest. Coincidence? who the hell knows.
I am still a bit of a rookie at this. Do increases like this happen often, or do they preceed a Google update of some kind?
It doesn't really mean an update is going to happen. All it can tell a webmaster is that Google is very curious about what is on your site and it is most probably deep crawling - which is a good thing. A deep crawl usually preceeds your site being indexed (or refreshed if already indexed). HOWEVER - given the new big daddy infrastructure and F'd up algorithm it is anyones guess what will occur this time. But I always take googlebot heavily indexing my site as a good omen. It is better then googlebot NOT visiting the site at all or very infrequently.
I checked in on my stats and don't have any unusual activity on my side. Looks like you are the luck one!
I noticed this too. I have noticed a lot of Googlebot activity with my sites. hmmm... I think its that time of the year.
My payment just cleared to AdWords and today my natural Google traffic is up 30%... the world is full of coincidence!