So apparently it doesn’t take long for someone (Google?) to find you. I don’t believe I’m linked from anywhere yet, but I did ask an online site to create a sitemap.xml for me. With timestamps only minutes before the timestamp on my sitemap.xml file this is in my error.log:
[Fri Sep 16 13:37:39 2011] [error] [client 66.249.67.135] File does not exist: /var/www/robots.txt
[Fri Sep 16 13:49:31 2011] [error] [client 66.147.244.79] File does not exist: /var/www/robots.txt
A quick googling of those IPs seems to show that the first one is owned by googlebot.com, and the second one is an anonymous looking box on bluehost.com. Friend or foe?