Is this real???
 

Ever since, well 4-5 days ago, my forums have been bombarded with guests, usually we are lucky to see one or two online, but ever since we got all our threads and forum pages online on google, (1050 pages i might add :)) we've been getting a load of guests, and it keeps getting higher, we had 32 guests online at a time today, when i was the only active member online. Also whenever i check online.php, many of them are looking at the same things, but all have different ip's, also in our vBStats, google.com has shot up to the top for incoming hits. All seems a lil too much for a forum thats barely active so i want to know if this is genuinely from Google, or there could be an error in my forums

If the IPs resolve to crawln.googlebot.com, then it really is Google unless somebody went through the effort of spoofing their IP.

well i never get crawln.googlebot.com in the ip column for any ip's, but i've had googlebots on my forums quite a few times in the past few months, probibly why our PR has increased greatly now, also we've been using your spiderable url's hack, so a load of our threads and forums have got on google, along with the threads they picked up from our sitemap as well

Once that happened to me and it was because someone had linked to an attachment and posted it on another forum and whoever read the thread on this other site showed up on my forum as a guest :D

heh the difference is that much of this comes from actual threads

Thats a great deal. Hope your forums get popular alot :)

Yep, it's happening to me, too. I usually have around 10 guests online looking at my archive at the busiest times of the day (10 pm - midnight for me). The archive is great for getting new users.