is there any direct connection to the regular google bot vs the google image bot?

does it hurt your google listings if you ban the image bot?

No, they are separate but the standard must be the one feeding the imagebot with the urls... the imagebot is not passing by very often... and no it does not hurt your listing to ban the imagebot, you just lose the trafic you could get from the image searches...

when googlebot is on your site, if you don't have access to useragents upfront (they only show in logs, not active users for some reason) how do i know which bot is at my site?

They don't show in active users because the number and variety of bots is so huge that you'd get all excited. But it's the humans who pick up the phone and call you, buy online etc. They are the ones you should be worried about.

I used to have a tool which monitored bots and I had thousands visiting the few sites I tracked. You can see some of the bots I researched in what remains of my spider directory but I no longer list the bots I hadn't researched.

What I did learn was that the major bots will visit even a stagnant site with comforting regularity.

And that the referral spammers and miscellaneous bots probably visit more often.

So long as your site is spiderable and you have inbound links (such as from your forum signature) you'll be visited. Don't stress over it.

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