Can you confirm legitimate Google Bot traffic?
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We use Cloudflare as a firewall. I noticed a significant number of blocks of bot traffic. One of the things they do is try to block bad bot traffic. But it seems they are mistakenly blocking Google Bot traffic. If you use Cloudflare, you may want to look into this as well. Also, can you confirm if the following IPs are for legitimate Google Bots?
66.249.79.88
66.249.79.65
66.249.79.8066.249.79.76
Thanks,
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Following the advice here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en I can confirm that they are indeed Googlebot.
If you use Fetch as Google in Search Console, are you seeing errors?
Cloudflare has an article here on the subject:
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What Alex has pointed out is what you're needing.
Also, I'd like to remember you that Googlebot crawls from several IP ranges. Not only the 66.xxx.xxx.xx.
EDIT:
Alex pointed me out that I've made a mistake. So I've checked my data in server logs.
In some of the sites I'm working, most of the traffic comes from the range: [66.249.6x.xxx-66.249.7x.xxx]Always, when in doubt, with a reverse DNSlookup you'll find out whether it's an official GoogleBot or not.
Hope it helps.
Best luck.
Gaston -
10.0.0.0/8 is a private subnet and therefore unroutable, so I don't think you would have seen traffic from that subnet from Googlebot!
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Dammit, my mistake.
Was proabaly still asleep. I've checked with my log files and updated it
Thanks Alex!
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Thank you very much for all of your feedback folks. I really appreciate it. Cloudflare has acknowledged that they are aware of the issue and working to correct it. It also affected Bing Bots. I ended up white listing the IP ranges, and our Google crawl has increased as a result.