Comments on: Googlebot Makes An Appearance In Web Analytics Reports

By: nickstamoulis

nickstamoulis — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:03:13 +0000

I am glad I am not the only one who saw this recently…

By: google.analytics

google.analytics — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 04:38:35 +0000

The official Google bot does not execute Google Analytics javascript. We’re not sure what it is exactly, it could be anyone’s bot, some intern’s experiment, or other such traffic.

By: sean

sean — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 10:53:24 +0000

I am also seeing the same behavior, albeit rarely.

I first searched for the network location “google inc.” and then listed browsers for that location. I also checked the raw log data which showed useragent “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)” from crawl-66-249-68-176.googlebot.com triggering Google Analytics [I use _setLocalRemoteServerMode() to send GA data to a log file].

It would be nice if Google would enlighten us on what is happening here and what we should expect in the future.

Google has crawled JavaScript, CSS and Flash for years (their 2008 post didn’t announce this, it only confirmed what was already known [http://www.antezeta.com/blog/google-css-javascript]) . I imagine the crawling allows discovery of readable text and links as well as the detection of “search engine spam”.

Crawling (and analyzing), however, is not the same as the actual execution of JavaScript, required to trigger JavaScript based Web Analytics reporting. Google’s prior adventure with the much maligned Google Web Accelerator [http://www.antezeta.com/blog/google-web-accelerator] leads me to think they’d be very cautious before actually executing JavaScript on any sort of wide basis due to the damage which could be done.

By: Dudibob

Dudibob — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 10:11:17 +0000

I see what you mean, got 3 visits from the ‘browser’ on the 12th July and only then… site gets a lot of traffic, no sign of the Googlebot browser on lesser sites though.

By: André Scholten

André Scholten — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:54:11 +0000

“This might be due to the fact that the bot does not fetch cookies, which is essential to accurate analytics tracking”

If it doesn’t fetch cookies the tracking isn’t fired at all. You need to have a cookies enabled bot to trigger the GA tracking.

Some sources at Google deny this is the real Googlebot, but why does the bot appear in a lot of different GA accounts? Strange.