Larry & Sergey better watch their credit cards. Travis reports on Cre8asite today that Googlebot signed up as a new customer at an e-commerce site he manages. From the post:
I did a reverse lookup. It's Google Boys... The IP Address was 66.249.65.131...
OrgName: Google Inc.
OrgID: GOGL
Address: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
City: Mountain View
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94043
Country: USGoogle has signed up for our e-commerce store.
Can't imagine what parts Googlebot is looking for from his shop, but it's certainly a fascinating study in bot behavior. I've personally never seen any of the spiders try to fill out and complete our e-commerce site forms. Maybe we just don't have what the bots need...
Interesting theory, Jason. Maybe Google is doing this to keep one company with multiple websites and hundreds of affiliates from taking the top twenty positions in the organic SERPs?
I would suspect that google is trying to increase validation on sites it includes in froogle results.
Currently froogle only allows one domain per unique set of products. So if you have two eStores with the same products (different domains, GUI's, and prices - targetting a slightly different audience for example) than froogle will only accept one feed. You can submit both feeds but they usually figure it out within a couple of weeks.
The work around is to insure that both sites are on different IP's (C classes too but I am not 100% sure, but to be safe), each has it's own secure cert, and from there you are good. Naturally you also have to kill footprints and significantly change titles and descriptions as well.
I suspect that this bot behaviour may be GOOG attempting to improve this validation by sending the bot beyond the shopping cart/login page. Just my hair brained theories though. I know this is an issue on a purely academic level ... I would ever personally engage in spamming froogle.
Cheers Rand. We dont know much about it yet, but the javscript validator for the form was disabled, allowing Googlebot only to supply a limited number of fields.
Normally, all the fields have to be filled in, but in this case, it was a limited selection.
Needless to say, we though it was an exciting development in robot behaviour, and if it does pass through the login, there is vastly different content for signed-up customers. The price changes.
The question is this. Do we want Google reporting results on our HP Parts that are less than the normal retail price. Probably not.
maybe an engineer that forgot to turn off the googlebot UA in his browser ?