There is an interesting tactic I've dicovered which will get the GoogleBot visiting your site within seconds, as a result of pinging your blog (or web page) to the blog directories.

Typically, pinging is used strictly on blogs, and submits your blog to the various blog directories including Technorati, Blog Digger, FeedBurner, etc. However, some web pages could also be considered "blog" content and could also benefit from a ping.

After running an auto-ping tool, such as Blog Blaster, if you check your web logs you will see a number of bots immediately comb through your site. Among them, is Googlebot. Other notable bots include TechnoratiBot, WSBlogs, and a few miscellaneous spiders. Average time is roughly 30 seconds after the ping.

The following is a real-time list of bots visiting a page within 30 seconds of pinging with Blog Blaster (bots visiting the page after 1 minute are not included):

66.218.65.40 - ping.blo.gs/2.0
72.13.32.7 - bot
72.13.32.7 - bot
208.66.64.163 - Technoratibot/0.7
66.249.66.176 - Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

It is not clear what causes Googlebot to immediately query the page content. It's possible Google has teamed in some way with one of the larger blog directories, such as Technorati, in order to stay on top of news trends and real-time posts.

There is a question of whether having the Googlebot visit in this manner is a true spidering of your site (and publishing in their search engine), or if it is some other type of spidering or statistical gathering.

Either way, it is certainly a good thing to get the spiders hitting your site. This gets your content listed faster in the search engines and only takes a click to do.

If you have access to real-time web logs, download Blog Blaster and give this a try on one of your blogs.