The many flavours of Googlebot

Googlebot, as you probably know, is the search bot used by Google to search the web for new pages. Googlebot comes in many flavours and types, each of which performs a different function. Here is an overview of the different types of Googlebot currently crawling the world wide web.

Deepbot
Deepbot is a deep crawler that tries to folow every link on the web and download as many pages as it can for the Google index. It also examines the internal structure of a site, giving a complete picture for the index.

Freshbot
Freshbot on the other hand, is a newer bot that crawls the web looking for fresh content. The Google freshbot was implemented to take some of the pressure off of the GoogleBot. The freshbot recalls pages already in the index and then crawls them for new, modified, or updated pages. In this way, Google is better equipped to keep up with the ever-changing Web.

MediaBot
MediaBot is the Google crawler for Adsense Publishers. Mediabot is used to determine wich ads Google should display on Adsense pages. There is a strong debate over whether or not the MediaBot is giving websites with Adsense an advantage in the search engines.

Image Bot
Have images on your site? If so, you have likely been visited by our next Google spider, the ImageBot. The Imagebot prowls the Web for images to place in Google's image search. Images are ranked based upon their filename, surrounding text, alt text, and page title.

AdsBot
AdsBot is one of Google's newest spiders. This new crawler is being used to analyze the content of advertising landing pages, which helps determine the Quality score that Google assigns to your ads. Google uses this Quality score in combination with the amount you are willing to bid to determine the position of your ads.