I'm wondering about that, too, VS. I'm using to seeing about 1000 googlebot hits a week in my logs. Since the Santy worm escapades, that's dropped way down, to under 100 this week. But still the last cache date for the home page of my main site is just over 24 hours ago... Could it be that Googlebot is using a new user-agent string or has added another new bot?
Update: Okay, there's something wierd here. I have two stats programs, one monitoring just my forum. On further inspection, it's not that Googlebot has slowed down per se -- I've had over 2000 page on my site as a whole hits since January 1. What has slowed well down are the Googlebot hits on my forum. Now I'm wondering if any of the anti-Santy fixes are somehow blocking Googlebot... or if Googlebot is losing interest in forums?
Anybody notice if Google has reverted to older cached pages? One page I watch closely was showing a late Dec cache date. BUT today, that same page dropped one position in serps and the cache date of the page today is Nov 18th! Caryl
I cried about not having my pages indexed in a while yesterday...Today most of my recent changes have been reflected. McDar...cache dates for part of my site has changed from mid-December dates to Jan 5th and Jan 6th. when I do a site: command the new dates are not reflected yet.
Most of my pages cache are from 29 to 30 of December. Only my homepage shows a cache of 7 January, but that is crawled everyday and added to the G index.
I've installed most of the anty-santy fixes as well, and googlebot have crawled over 2000 pages in one of my phpbb forums the last 24 hours.. Slurp and msnbot have also been quite active in there as well the last 48 hours by the way. Edit: The cache for my index page has just been updated in google, says Jan 6 now.. The old one was from Dec. 24.
Okay -- that's good to know. I've seen other forums where Googlebot took a holiday in the past for a while but always came back -- this is the first time it's happened to me but I'll assume it's a temporal anomaly for now... I am also seeing unusually active spidering by MSNbot and Slurp in the same time period -- maybe Googlebot just doesn't want to be hanging around the same mall