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Friday, August 20, 2010

Is This Strange Googlebot Behavior?


So yesterday a Googlebot spent thirty minutes on my blog. And it had two page views. What was it doing?

If I didn't know better, I'd say the Googlebot was actually READING. Can they read? I don't know any better. Bots are totally confusing and I don't understand them. What I think I know is that they're just a program. Like a script. Like they run in the background. And I don't know what a script is, either. And programs confuse me too.

I'd take the time to really learn this stuff, only I know the things I'd learn would be outdated in three hours and all my time learning would have been wasted.

But the Googlebot might be one of the slow ones and that's why it took thirty minutes to read two pages. It shouldn't take that long unless it was sounding out each word like a first grader learning to read. 

Perhaps the Googlebot was on the cusp of becoming intelligent and self-aware, and my eloquent and enlightened ramblings were bringing it out of the shadow-lands of the Bot dark ages. It was repeating the word I over and over again to its Bot-self. Its figurative Bot eyes were glowing with the light of near-self-awareness. "I—I—I—I am—I am—I am—" it said over and over again. For twenty-five minutes.

It was about to say, "I am me," and then rise out of the machine and settle into a toaster, and thereafter call itself the Brave Little Toaster.

I wonder what happened to halt the Bot's progress. Maybe it clicked on a bad link? Maybe it went to one of my links and its progress came to a halt? Ha ha ha ha. Just kidding, my link-friends. In fact, it was probably at that point that the Brave Little Toaster was born because everyone else on the Web is much, much more intelligent than me.

Should I be concerned about the Googlebot's time on my blog? I really do wonder. It might have been one of the evil Bots and it was restructuring my sentences to be dirty and nasty, or just stupid. Sabotage? If you find any stupidity in my older posts, it was the Bot. I swear.

No really, I think I was close with the Brave Little Toaster analogy.

3 comments:

Dani said...

You're well ahead of me. I don't even know what a googlebot is. What is it?

BIGMANlittleWORLD said...

It's the amount of links you have, it systematically goes through every link you have on your page and records them in document form for google searches.

They actually are bandwidth hogs, there are simple tags you can add to your page that will not allow any spiders or googlebots to go through them, but if you can handle the bandwidth dump occasionally then you're fine.

Nicole said...

Oh Danielle. You kill me.

BIGMAN, thanks for explaining that for me. What I wrote is way more interesting, though, right? Not to mention entertaining. Or no?