Many of us especially those who are using Statscounter web tracker maybe getting random visits from Google via its California head office, some times from location like Council Bluffs, Iowa and Lappeenranta, Finland, usually with the same ip address. Does this mean that Google is spying on our blog with a view to penalize no-standard sites? or is it just one Google employer who is bored and decides to search things on the internet perhaps by coincidence he or she lands on our page, or is there a hidden agenda behind this sneeky behaviour. There are many possible explanation of this visits. Some are
Google’s Updates; Panda, Hummingbird and Penguin Updates
Google maybe visiting your blog in other to know whether your site is web worthy, whether it’s quality based and such visits will then be added in their database, whenever they visit your site the outcome of that visit will be recorded assigning a number 1-10 (speculating) based on the quality of contents found, this is similar to pagerank. Although this is not a fact, but all evidence points to the record obtained being used to determine its next update and how your site will be affected. Check the various updates Google has done since; the Pandas, Penguins, Hummingbirds it has all been about rewarding quality blogs and quality articles. You shouldn’t be afraid of this visits if your blog is quality itself.
2. Google is penalizing sites manually
Go back to your log again, what do you see? There is always a pattern to big G visits, some time some random words like “blue wiget” and then plus is added so that it becomes “blue+widget” maybe used by big G to visit your blog, what is suprising is that the words used to visit that page may not be related to that page content, equally more suprising is at the time (or prior to) of that visit that particular article shows up as #1 to 3, but after the visit that page drops down as low as #30! So is Google leaving bots out of this? Are humans now reviewing blogs and websites? Well big G knows best. Best way to counter this is to avoid “copied contents”
3.
Could be random visits
Another explanation of this visits maybe random visits either from Google’s bot or from their employees. Either their workers are bored and they decide to play around with big G’s computers, punching some random keys and landing on your site. Or their bots have gone mad and somehow become supersmart or somehow decides to operate by themselves, visiting blogs and websites for the fun of it.
It should not come as a suprise to us if we open our stats log and see this visits from Google ,since Google indexes our websites and blogs, it is important they too make their presence known to our sites as we are making our presence known by showing up in search results. Again Google visiting us is also a good thing as receiving such visitor is worthy. So guys look on the bright side you are getting visits from a King! As such you are honored.
Common Major outcome of this visits
Majority of blog owners has seen their site experience common things like traffic decrease and increase (Alexa ranks), articles being ranked low and high in searches. They experience the above things whenever they are paid a visit from big G’s mountain view office. This leads them to conclude that
– This started with the advent of Penguin : Some started experiencing it immediately after Penguin update, although I disagree as a fraction of webmasters started seeing theirs even before Penguin update.
– This is done by a human : This maybe possible as the pattern of visits fits that of humans, unless a bot is designed like humans that is when bots and web crawlers maybe factored in otherwise it’s certainly humans.
– The result is a drop in rankings ; Popular opinion is that whenever such visits happen, that page it visits will automatically drop in ranking. Although a tiny fraction disagrees on this as their pages experience increased ranking whenever such visits happen.
Way out
Do everything you know is right, read Google’s TOS, and observe their suggestions found on their webmaster tools and implement them. Make sure your blog if you run a blog, is up to standard, so that if big G hits you won’t be sorry (I got hit sometime ago that’s why…)
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