GoogleBot Doesn't Pass A Referrer; Generally Directly Hits URLs

Aug 11, 2017 - 7:34 am 0 by

Greentech Google Bot 1900px

Google's John Mueller confirmed on Twitter that GoogleBot, Google's web crawler, generally does not pass referrer data because it typically only directly accesses URLs. So GoogleBot will not click from page to page on your web site but rather gather the URLs on a web page and visit those URLs at some point directly.

If you visit a page directly, it passes no referrer data.

John did add that "for embedded content (scripts, css, etc) I suspect we include the webpage's referrer." He added you should check your server logs to see if that is true or not.

Here are the tweets:

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

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