Google Adsense Spider?

[Lee]

I just noticed this in some of our server logs on sites we have Adsense on, never noticed this spider before or really know anything about it.

Im guessing its what Google uses to crawl a site to make sure the Adsense ads being displayed are on topic but im curious to know if this helps sites get any better SERPs too?

Any of you folks know anything about the Adsense Spider?

Regards,

Lee

[Kirkman]

Are you seeing it identify itself as "Google Adsense Spider"? I haven't seen that one. I will see a google bot called "mediaSense." (or something along those lines. My access logs just rolled over and digging out my old logs are pain at the moment.) Anyhow... I'll see the mediaSense bot hit a site at the same time as someone who is not blocking google ads hits the site.

What I think is happening is that someone visits the site, activating the code for an AdSense ad. Google has its bot do a check of the words on the site to figure out the most appropriate ads to serve up based on the page's content.

That's just my assumption on what's going on.... and if we aren't talking about the same bot, then nevermind.

[jIgG]

i don't think having adsense is an advantage

as per Matt Cutts google adsenseBot crawls are chached and used by googleBot to save bandwidth, those things can suck your site up in a matter of hours or less

Matt also stated that you will gain zero advantage in search listings however if you are serving different content to MediaBot then to Googlebot then you could be in trouble.

[Kirkman]

Adsense won't help with where your site shows up in search listings, correct. However, it can provide another source of income for non-adult sites.

To amend my previous post, the bot I see coming from Google Adsense calls iteself "MediaPartners-Google".

[Lee]

Well im actually seeing it on a VBulletin based site in the 'whos online' section because VBulletin identifies robots and spiders so forum owners can distinguish between them and actual guest posters so im not sure if it is actually called 'Google Adsense Spider' or if that is just what VBulletin has used as an identifier in their forum software.

Regards,

Lee

[Kirkman]

Okay, yeah. Now that you say that, I've seen a similar thing with phpBB. If you were to look in the access logs you'll probably find an access by a bot with the user agent of "MediaPartners Google" which would be the AdSense Bot.

As I mentioned before, I think it hits the page when an ad needs to be served up so it knows what kind of ads to place there.