Search Engine Slam

I installed dolphin on a site and let it sit for a couple of months until I could get to it. When I did Google slammed it with searches and burned up all the bandwidth. Could be spoofing and script kiddies but I don't know. Any ideas if those were legitimate hits from Google.

Any accounts on the site? Blogs?

Last time that happen to me it was caused by spammers posting to the blogs. It's unlikely google would take down a site. They normally do not crawl that fast unless you have a real crappy low end hosting account.

Check server access logs on hits to the site and where they were from.

 If you have webmasters tools ... you can control how often Google Bots visit your site! You will also be able to lookup and tell how ofter Google has been hitting your pages ... it's all good in-depth information. Also ask your host to view your traffic logs / stats if your not sure how to and see if the hits you are getting is legitimate.

It's on a shared hosting server. Admin is the only member. It was googlebot that did all the hits. I blew away the site and reinstalled Dolphin. I have no control over Intrusion Detection so I'm kind of limited. I would have to find out who it is so I can ask the sysad to do something. I'm going to take a close look at the hits throughout the day. I just can't imagine how google would crawl it that much. I set the join to invite only. I can't see any other settings in Dolphin that would help me. Do you mean webmaster tools on the sites control panel? Is there a webmaster tool addon for Dolphin?

No.

Google Webmaster Tools. It's nothing in dolphin.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en

How much bandwidth on your hosting account? Who is the host?

Also. It may not have been just google. Other search engines as well as spam bots hitting the index page or join page to try and join. Even when a spammer can't join the page is still displayed which still uses bandwidth.

If the number of spammers visiting a site hits the 3000 per day mark, low bandwidth accounts will run out.

 Not able to control the rate of google bot crawl via webmaster central anymore FYI. 

You are wrong sir! below is a screenshot of my Google webmasters tools showing the Bot Crawl Rate tool still available and working within webmasters tools ... Google just changed how you get to this setting but I will run over it now:-

Change the Google Bot Crawl Rate:

I use Incapsula to filter out all the bots I don't want visiting my site and to automatically exclude all bad bots.