The normal Google spider: 66.249.64.47 - "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 1227 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

The additional Google spider: 66.249.66.129 - "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 38358 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

What is the difference between these two Google spiders?

The new Google spider uses a slightly different user agent: "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

This means that Googlebot now also accepts the HTTP 1.1 protocol. The new spider might be able to understand more content formats, including compressed HTML.

Why does Google do this?

Google hasn't revealed the reason for it yet. There are two main theories:

The first theory is that Google uses the new spider to spot web sites that use cloaking, JavaScript redirects and other dubious web site optimization techniques. As the new spider seems to be more powerful than the old spider, this sounds plausible.

The second theory is that Google's extensive crawling might be a panic reaction because the index needs to be rebuilt from the ground up in a short time period. The reason for this might be that the old index contains too many spam pages.

What does this mean to your web site?

If you use questionable techniques such as cloaking or JavaScript redirects, you might get into trouble. If Google really uses the new spider to detect spamming web sites, it's likely that these sites will be banned from the index.

To obtain long-term results on search engines, it's better to use ethical search engine optimization methods. General information about Google's web page spider can be found here.

It's likely that the new spider announces a major Google update. We'll have to see what this means in detail.


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