Entries tagged with “reverse dns” from Search Engine CookBook

I've seen a few posts from people on forums over the last few weeks complaining that GoogleBot is misbehaving and chewing up silly amounts of bandwidth.

Unfortunately it's all too easy to pretend to be GoogleBot (or any other bot for that matter) simply by spoofing the UserAgent string ie. telling the world that you are something that you aren't.

So how can you tell if a bot really is from Google?

One of the official Google blogs has the answer - DNS lookups:


Basically you need to check that the forward and reverse DNS entries are valid ie. that the A and PTR records are from Google...

That's a bit of a pain, but will save you headaches if you're seeing strange activity in your logs...