Jon Revill on Load Balancing Between AdSense Bot and Googlebot
Unless there is a certain level of load balancing going on, the mediabot caching could potentially affect rankings.

From the log files that I have been looking through, roughly 10% of Google-related crawls come from the mediabot.

If Googlebot still accesses the site with the same frequency, mediabot increases the likelihood that new content will be cached and included to be evaluated by the algo.

For this to have no effect on ranking potential based off of new content, the frequency of Goolebot visits would have to decrease for AdSense publishers.

If this load balancing is NOT taking place (which we have NOT verified - we're seeking AdSense publishers who can show a decrease in Googlebot visits that keeps the overall google-related bot visits at a steady pace. -ed) we run into the following scenario:

We have two sites, website A and B.

Both are ecomm websites in the same vertical and both host a forum that has regular posts that are relevant to their specific vertical.

As forum comments are added, relevant content increases for any given page. Both websites have the same relative frequency of visits from Googlebot.

Website A does not publish AdSense within their forum. This means that Website A has its Googlebot visits spread across the entire site including the forum.

Website B publishes AdSense within its forum. This means that not only do they have the same number of Googlebot visits across the entire site, but they also have added caching that is specifically targeted at their forum.

This targeting allows fresh, relevant content in Website B’s forum to be picked up more quickly and frequently. This could have a potential positive effect on Website B’s ranking by adding new content to be evaluated.

Even with a level of load balancing, if mediabot only targets pages publishing AdSense, the AdSense tags could be used to bait Google into caching specific pages and/or caching specific pages more frequently.

(This entire post written by MarketSmart Interactive's Jon Revill, Manager of Interactive Technology. It was posted by Garrett.)

Call if you're an AdSense publisher who can show a decrease in Googlebot visits that keeps the overall google-related bot visits at a steady pace (if you can show that Google balanced the crawl-load between mediabot and Googlebot). 919-433-3139.

More:
Google's Mediapartner Bot Index Creep Indicate AdSense Publisher SERPs Advantage?
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |