mothership testservice-pa googleapis

[Lisa Agostoni]

Anyone know what this is crawling our site? It's throwing 404s for pages that dont exist. mothership testservice-pa googleapis

Of course when I went to the URL, it’s a 502 from Google. http://mothershiptestservice-pa.googleapis.com/  Looks like it’s some kind of crawler they are testing?  Any ideas? 

[Nathaniel Emm]

I've been seeing this more and more as well.  More concerning, it seems to be appearing in search results on Google itself, in sort of a self-referential paradox (the links, of course, lead to a 502).  Searching for more information led me here, and to images of a "spaceship" on Google Earth and snarky comments about Alphabet.

I'm genuinely curious.  Here's hoping more information appears!  Honestly it could be a new crawler or something similar still in beta, which would explain "testservice" in the URL, no information readily accessible, and it being hosted on the googleapis domain.

[Nathaniel Emm]

Note: Check out https://www.google.com/?q=site:mothershiptestservice-pa.googleapis.com for the indexed pages.  Some of them appear to be references to standard webpages, but others look like they reference actual user searches.  Very odd indeed.

[Robert Blackwell]

I am do allot of SEO work and noticed this that this mothershiptestservice has scrapped some of my high traffic pages and are not negatively effecting my rankings.It is not cool... I have to submit each link to google disavow so I can tell them basically its not my work, so I wont be penalized for it. Its been a pain in the A$$. I will update on new findings. 

[Meg McLean]

Curious to know about this crawler. Looks like search terms are part of each URL string, too.

On Friday, September 25, 2015 at 1:15:21 PM UTC-4, Lisa Agostoni wrote:

[Grace Gardner]

Has anyone figured this out?

[Cindy Lau]

I'm getting quite a few 404's because it's trying to visit pages that don't exist on site..