What IP Address does Googlebot use to read your site when coming from an external backlink?

[MattBassos]

Hi All,

I'm trying to find more information on what IP address Googlebot would use when arriving to crawl your site from an external backlink.

I'm under the impression Googlebot uses international signals to determine the best IP address to use when crawling (US / non-US) and then carries on with that IP when it arrives to your website?

E.g. - Googlebot finds www.example.co.uk. Due to the ccTLD, it decides to crawl the site with a UK IP address rather than a US one. As it crawls this UK site, it finds a subdirectory backlink to your website and continues to crawl your website with the aforementioned UK IP address.

Is this a correct assumption, or does Googlebot look at altering the IP address as it enters a backlink / new domain?

Also, are ccTLDs the main signals to determine the possibility of Google switching to an international IP address to crawl, rather than the standard US one? Am I right in saying that hreflang tags don't apply here at all, as their purpose is to be used in SERPS and helping Google to determine which page to serve to users based on their IP etc.

If anyone has any insight this would be great.

[Alick300]

Hi,

First of all "Google crawls from many IPs and they have confirmed that they do periodically add new ones.  And there are also various Googlebot useragents, not just the regular one.  This is why Google doesn't publish a list of all the IPs, because there are so many of them and they can change" .

You can see full conversation here @ https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/webmasters/4fKthSy7oFQ/GgslLXJnDQAJ

Second Today Google says "IP Addresses Don't Matter For Backlinks & Search Rankings"

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ip-addresses-backlinks-rankings-26561.html

Hope this helps

Thanks

[effectdigital]

There's a few things you need to marry up if you want to do this. You need the referring page or domain / hostname (to validate that the session came from a backlink you know about). Once you filter the data down like that, you just need to filter by user-agent ("googlebot" - or any user-agent string which contains "googlebot"). Then you just want to look at the IP address field in the tabular data and you have your answers!

Here's the problem, most IP-level data is contained within basic server-side analysis packages (like AWStats which is installed on most sites, within the cPanel) or alternatively you can go to the log files for much of the same data. Most referrer-level data (stuff that deals with attribution) is contained within Analytics suites like Adobe Omniture or Google Analytics.

In GA, you can't usually get to 'individual' IP-level data. There used to be a URL hack to force it to render, but it was killed off (and many people who used it were banned by Google). The reason for that is, Google don't want too much PID (Personally Identifiable Data) harvested by their tool. It creates too many legal issues for Google (and also, whomever is leveraging that data for potentially nefarious marketing purposes)

Since you won't get enough IP-level data from GA, you're going to have to go to log files and log analysis tools instead. Hopefully they will contain at least some referral level data... The issue is, getting all the pieces you want to align in a legally compliant way

Obviously you have your reasons for looking. I'd check if you can find anything on your CPanel in AWStats (if that's installed) or get the log files and analyse them with something like Screaming Frog Log File Analyser

I can't promise this will return the data you want, but it's probably your only hope

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