Google Fixing Reverse DNS GoogleBot Verification

Google has confirmed that there are some Google Bot user agent spiders not properly passing verification protocol.

Savvy webmasters noticed that Google Bot 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 Google Bot 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 Google Bot at this time.