Google Fixing Reverse DNS GoogleBot Verification

Google has confirmed that there are some GoogleBot useragent spiders not properly passing verification protocol. Savvy webmasters noticed that GoogleBot over the .249.70.0 /24 IP range was not returning the proper reverse DNS verification details. The response given was “no such host is known,” but the activity webmasters noticed was that it did appear to […]

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Google Webmaster Tools - Facebook FeaturedGoogle has confirmed that there are some GoogleBot useragent spiders not properly passing verification protocol.

Savvy webmasters noticed that GoogleBot over the .249.70.0 /24 IP range was not returning the proper reverse DNS verification details. The response given was “no such host is known,” but the activity webmasters noticed was that it did appear to be a legit Google crawler.

Google’s John Mueller confirmed on my Google+ post that this was indeed an issue on Google’s end. Temporarily they have stopped GoogleBot activity in those IP ranges and will fix the issue before they continue to crawl on those IP ranges.

The issue is that if you are blocking rogue spiders through reverse DNS verification, you may have blocked Google from crawling your site because of the failed DNS check.

Now Google is working on a fix but you should not have to worry about blocking a real GoogleBot at this time.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.

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