I am the victim of an "invasion of the googlebots" and would like to know if anyone a) has had similar experiences and b) knows what is going on. My homepage (www.cole.de) is hosted at a local provider here in Munich and has had pretty regular rates of traffic in the past (between 6.000 and 10.000 visits and about 1 GB of data transfer per month). In May, traffic suddenly began to double every month and reached 44 GB in July. According to my logfile the increase was completely due to crawlers originating from the domain "googlebot.com" which were pulling off loads and loads of Kilobytes. I only noticed because my provider started billing me for additional traffic over and above my contractual limit of 5 GB a month. In July, I had to pay about $150 extra. As a journalist, I smelled a story here ("Google Costs Hapless Homepager Owners Millions"), so I contaced the German press office. As usual (Google is rather paranoid in its dealings with the media) I received no reply, but immediately the invasion ceased! Does anybody have a good explanation, or have you suffered similar invasions of googlebots yourself?