Googlebot Visit Notifier

You might find this PHP script I came across via Keep An Eye On The Crawler at Secret Agent Reports useful.

The idea is to inform you when Google’s search engine spider, Googlebot, visits one of your web pages.

You reference the script from a PHP include on the page you want to monitor and it simply checks for a page request originating from the Googlebot user agent, sending you an email when there’s a match.

“By using my technique, the script announces me on my email when the Google crawler came on my new lauched website.”

“After the first crawling visit from Google, I suggest that you should upload your content. You will know exactly the time when you must make an upgrade to the content. Next time, the crawler will see the new content and take a decision, you will be moved in the sandbox for few hours or days (depends).”

Whilst I dispute the certainty of those assertions, including whether or not there is any such thing as a sandbox, I’m sure there are more than a few people who don’t have proper site stats, and would like to know for sure whether Google has visited or not.