On Friday 22 Sep 2006 11:39, you wrote:
Is this unusual, or what? Are search engines supposed to be amongst the biggest user agents recorded on a typical website? How much trolling and indexing is considered 'too much' ?
Whenever it becomes a problem. If you don't have enough genuine traffic, and you don't have much, then the search engines will look like they are dominating it, as they are pretty thorough. I've seen issues arise with some search bots, where they have discovered loops in a websites structure and downloaded multiple copies, or found novels links to dynamic content and indexed your entire database. So worth checking what pages they have been to, to see if those could be an issue.
Off-list thoughts on this welcome if the operational relevance of this issue is questioned...
Trust me, anything involving 40,000 hits is off-topic in Nanog, unless you have reason to believe the same 40,000 are happening to everyone on the net, or they took down 40,000 important websites. Most of the regular are just getting in, so expect to be flamed mercilessly.