Okay, I absolutely had to post this one. I noticed this in email a few days ago and couldn’t have believed it slipped by me so easily. Here’s a link to the full article! It looks like there have been some confirmed reports of a possible new Googlebot in town although Google has made no new announcement of such a technology (that could just be because they are in beta testing of it, I’m sure).
It seems to be that this new bot runs off of the Mozilla engine. This is potentially huge because it is a digression from the lynx browser that search engines normally use and would explain, in part, the hiring frenzy Google has made of Mozilla engineers and developers. More importantly than that, the Mozilla engine is much faster and has the ability to see through and use JavaScript. So, many new dynamic features that many SEO’s have warned against using, might now be usable through this new technology.
And boy is it fast too. In the article referenced above, the authors clients ha seen a 3500% increase in indexed pages over an 8 week period. Another article that I found during a search mentioned that the bot was just 7 times faster than normal. This is much faster than we all are used to and could potentially mean faster updates of Google’s data (possible leading to more frequent updates of their datacenters).
So check it out in your site logs and see if it’s true, but more importantly check your rankings, you might see some changes, you might not. But until we hear from Google officially, we don’t yet know how it’ll change the face of SEO as we know it.
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