Hi I new to this forum so if I am asking a question that is a real newbie question I apologise in advance. I run a site www.motocross.ie based in Ireland. Recently we started to run Google ads and have found that at any one time there could be up to 9 IP addresses from googlebot.com visiting our our website and forum. These robots have totally wrecked any chance of accurate visitor numbers to the site and forum. To give an example before we ran Google ads we would have had on average six thousands hit a day. Now since we installed the ads the visitor rate has almost doubled and it all as a result of the 'bots racking up multiple visits. So here are the questions: Is necessary for googlebots to be visiting your site every single minute of the day? "Here is the real newbie question", what are they doing in there apart from distorting visitors numbers? What would google do if I banned their IP addresses? At this stage I feel like dropping the google ads as we can not give accurate visitor figures to more traditional advertisers.When trying to sell them ads.
Have you tried analysing the figures through a free google analytics account ? Analytics should be able to separate bot visits from other types and you would also get more accurate data about your adwords spends and conversions.
Usually most webmasters are happy when good old googlebots are crawling their site. It means that your content will be up to date and that google will index your sites better. However, if you don't like them, feel free to ban their ip addresses. This may result in worse google ranking though, because the bots can index your site as much.