Dude, back in '05, Googlebot found my old website before anyone or anywhere had actually linked to it. Somehow.

I never did understand the purpose of these bots.. Maybe I'm just ignorant to the ways of the 'net or something.. But uh.. yay for being Googled? I dunno?

... its just really soo they can have this stuff on their search engine..... cuz ya kno pplz just want to randomly come onto this board and just read our posts but not join the community.....

yes and no some times it is and other times it isnt...... but all it ever does is scan every thing completely and then puts it into google's data banks and then has it read for if sum one searches it on Google

dont forget yahoo bot!

Refresh me, as I have more things blocked on my comp than I care to note. What are googlebots? and how do you know if they are present/tracking this site?

Google bots are just programs that crawl the internet to index it. My best guess as to how you know they're on your site:

Most users ever online was 9 on Thu Oct 30, 2008 10:52 pm

Doesn't mean that there weren't actually 9 people at the site at a given time....You don't think this place will ever have that many people on at one time?

AHA!! I FREAKIN KNEW IT! PROOF!!!

Crap! I've been compromised!

*jumps out the window but landing safely on a convineintly placed matress*

Oh wait...

Anyway, I thought google-bots were a way to get money? I can't remember, but somewhere in the internet a website I went to allowed google-bots so they would get advertising space or something.

Meh, not really, they use up bandwidth so that costs money XD

I heard this too. I was under the impression that google uses this to rate your site for advertising and using that rating sells advertising. Plus they use them to index:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=70897

Google doesn't do any advertising for you You have to pay them for that, And the way a site gets high-up on search results is how many incoming links it has from other high-traffic sites. If yahoo were to put a link to housepetscomic.com on it's homepage HPC would shoot up the list in search results.

Yeah, that's what I heard. It's like, you let Google put ads on your site and your website is advertised slightly more or something in it's own google ads. Something like that, don't quote me on that.

Suffice to say, ads work more than you might think. After all, Housepets! advertising got me here, right?

That all is Project Wonderful stuff. I don't have Google ads.

I skiped over this cause it seemed kinda stupid to freak over something so small. Besides, there are tons of search engines online and there's nothing you can do about it. Google, yahoo, ask, live, and so on.

Google does not do any advertising for you, you have to purchase Google Adwords credits. Every time someone either views or clicks on your advertisement they withdraw money from your account.

Under certain circumstances (I think things like Apache allow this) Google bots can find web pages that have no links to them, Any sort of server software that indexes pages will do this.

Google bots do not bring any income to your site directly, they do not put you on a list of/for advertisements, all they do is read the site, write down stuff about it, and occasionally take a photo of it (Cache), they do not put ads on your site, you do.

And as Rick said his advertising isn't through google.

Another day, another lesson, eh?