hi my site simplelance.com is being visited by google very frequently but so far this month the googlebot has used up 1.2GB of my transfer this is too much is there a way to stop revisits and set the bots to re crawl every 2 weeks or so.

Also why does googlebot take so much transfer none others have that visit my site.

I would wait a while before restricting google bot.
Frequent google activity is a good thing, The price we pay is increased bandwidth usage... If it carries on for a while i think google have a section on thier help pages about what to do if the google bot is using too much bandwidth.

I would throw away a pary if google does that to me I suggest you find some cheap bandwidth and enjoy the attention. Dont do any thing that might discourage googlebot!

i'm not sure but can't this be done with the meta refresh tag???

otherwise you may block (a part of) your site from the spiders in your robot.txt

i'm not sure but can't this be done with the meta refresh tag???

OFFICIALLY: the party line is no. And you're thinking of the revisit-after tag. The refresh tag refers to how long a browser has to wait before it redirects to another page, and the page to be redirected to.

UNOFFICIALLY: I've found that the tag doesn't work as explained, but it does work.

<meta name="revisit-after" value="7 days">

at least scared off the Googlebot in the times I've used it to the point where it crawled once every day or two when I was getting hammered by it. When I removed it (after about a week), it crawled the same way.

I've tried this stupid pet trick on half a dozen sites and it has worked every time. It could be coincidental, but I'm not inclined to believe that to be the case.

you should be happy with so much googlebot activity

Originally Posted by rehash

you should be happy with so much googlebot activity

i agree with him

I am happy with it crawling but not taking 50% of my monthly bandwith allowance.

well did you try the meta refresh then?

you can see a nice decription on adam's post