Has anyone else gotten strange WMT errors recently?
-
Yesterday, one of my sites got this message from WMT:
"Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 1 errors while attempting to retrieve DNS information for your site. The overall error rate for DNS queries for your site is 100.0%."
I did a fetch as Googlebot and everything seems fine. Also, the site is not seeing a decrease in traffic.
This morning, a client for which I am doing some unnatural links work emailed me about a site of his that got this message:
"Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 1130 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site's overall robots.txt error rate is 100.0%."
His robots.txt looks fine to me.
Is anyone else getting messages like this? Could it be a WMT bug?
-
DNS servers are just like any other server, Marie - they can have outages, downtime and configuration problems.If the Googlebot visited while your DNS server was burping, it might have received no response, hence the error warning. When you checked, the server may have settled down.
There are a number of best practices for good DNS hygiene, but my primary one is to monitor the uptime of your DNS the same way you do the uptime of your website. I use my paid subscription to Pingdom Tools to do this as one of my checks, but I'm sure many other uptime monitoring tools can do it as well.
The reason I monitor is that it can be a really helpful early warning system for potential upcoming severe problems (and can help explain otherwise unexplained site outages). With one client, we saw a steadily increasing number of errors over a few days (over 40 outages on the last day), leading us to change DNS hosting before things could fail completely and leave us in the lurch.
In addition, I always recommend against having the DNS hosted on the same server as the website, as would happen with cPanel DNS hosting, for example. Reason being, if you have severe prolonged server issues, you can't get at your DNS to change it quickly to somewhere else temporarily (even if just to host an explanatory error message)
I also like to ensure the DNS is hosted somewhere with good geographic redundancy so even if one nameserver goes out, there are still multiple backups to keep things rolling. No matter how good your website's uptime is, if your DNS dies, you're still off line.
My guess is the DNS server was having temporary issues that resolved by the time you checked it. I'd want to be sure that wasn't happening on a regular basis. (relying on Google to report issues isn't nearly accurate or timely enough),
As far as the robots.txt - do you have uptime monitoring on that site? I can't count the number of new clients who thought things were fine with their website, when in fact they were having constant short outages that went unnoticed as they weren't on their own site constantly enough to catch it. I always recommend a system that checks at 1-minute intervals for just this reason. If you don't have independent verification that the site was fully up, you can't really discount the WMT warnings safely.
Lemme know if you want more info on uptime monitoring services & methods.
Paul
-
Yikes. That would not be good!
-
Wait until they tell you that they are taking your adsense account down in 72 hours... and you know that they have an algo problem... when you tell them that a noob employee who doesn't know the rules that you display ads under tells you that you are down to 48 hours.
-
Thx. All checks out well on the dns check. I'm calling this a bug.
-
I know it I've had much higher traffic spikes than anything I've seen recently and still they sent this message. It's bizarre! But definitely not one that worries me. I'm like you, I do not get excited when I see a message in that inbox...
Anyway just thought it fit because it was so strange and seemingly unnecessary.
-
If you checked and all is fine, it maybe a be a temporary bug, it happens from time to time.
The 100% rate could be that it was only one crawl, hence 100% error rate (1 of 1), just wait for the next crawl.Anyway, in the meantime, check your domain with a DNS checker, you can use www.dnsstuff.com, www.intodns.com or dnscheck.pingdom.com/ to make sure everything is working correctly or to see if there's anything you need to take to your hosting provider.
-
Haha Jesse! I'd rather have that message. That is a weird one. I have had things go super viral and I've never had a message telling me of an INCREASE in traffic. Some of them have been increased Google searches too...not just direct or Facebook visits.
I have had a message that there was a decrease in traffic for my top URL once. This was when one of my sites had a slight Panda hit.
I think the messages are very random.
Whenever I see a (1) next to messages in WMT my heart races a little. It's usually a good thing because I am waiting to hear back from a reconsideration request for a client though.
-
Well I got this message recently:
Search results clicks for http://www.---------- have increased significantly.
This message is not indicative of any problem in your site. It is simply to inform you that the number of clicks that one of your pages receives has increased recently. If you have just added new content, this may indicate that it has become more popular on Google. The number of clicks that your site receives from Google can change from day to day for a variety of factors, including automatic algorithm updates.I found it strange because everything looks about normal. Sure we had a bit better of a day than usual but just barely.. Nothing I'd even blink twice at.
It's strange because this is only the second time I've ever received a message in GWT. But hey, I'm not complaining about this one.
Probably unrelated to what you're describing but just thought I'd share.
Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Sitemap error in Webmaster tools - 409 error (conflict)
Hey guys, I'm getting this weird error when I submit my sitemap to Google. It says I'm getting a 409 error in my post-sitemap.xml file (https://cleargear.com/post-sitemap.xml). But when I check it, it looks totally fine. I am using YoastSEO to generate the sitemap.xml file. Has anyone else experienced this? Is this a big deal? If so, Does anyone know how to fix? Thanks EwTswL4
Technical SEO | | Extima-Christian0 -
Help! How to Remove Error Code 901: DNS Errors (But to a URL that doesn't exist!)
I have 2 urgent errors saying there are 2 x error code 909's detected. These don't link to any page - but I can tell there is a mistake somewhere - I just don't know what needs changing. http://www.justkeyrings.co.ukhttp/www.justkeyrings.co.uk/printed-promotional-keyrings http://www.justkeyrings.co.ukhttp/www.justkeyrings.co.uk/blank-unassembled-keyrings Could someone help please? screen-shot-2015-08-11-at-13.18.17.png?t=1439292942
Technical SEO | | FullSteamBusiness0 -
What if 404 Error not possible?
Hi Everyone, I get an 404 error in my page if the URL is simply wrong, but for some parameters, like if a page has been deleted, or has expired, I get an error page indicating that the ID is wrong, but no 404 error. It is for me very difficult to program a function in php that solve the problem and modify the .htaccess with the mod_rewrite. I ask the developer of the system to give a look, but I am not sure if I will get an answer soon. I can control the content of the deleted/expired page, but the URL will be very similar to those that are ok (actually the url could has been fine, but now expired). Thinking of solutions I can set the expired/deleted pages as noindex, would it help to avoid duplicated title/description/content problem? If an user goes to i.e., mywebsite.com/1-article/details.html I can set the head section to noindex if it has expired. Would it be good enough? Other question, is it possible anyhow to set the pages as 404 without having to do it directly in the .htacess, so avoiding the mod_rewrite problems that I am having? Some magical tag in the head section of the page? Many thanks in advance for your help, Best Regards, Daniel
Technical SEO | | te_c0 -
Best action to take for "error" URLs?
My site has many error URLs that Google webmaster has identified as pages without titles. These are URLs such as: www.site.com/page???1234 For these URLs should I: 1. Add them as duplicate canonicals to the correct page (that is being displayed on the error URLs) 2. Add 301 redirect to the correct URL 3. Block the pages in robots.txt Thanks!
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Title errors for pages behind a login
On our website we have content which is located behind a members login. the SEOMoz crawl report has returned these pages with a "no title" error against them. It appears that these pages are being crawled until the website prompts it to login. I can only presume that it follows the url but doesn't have an opportunity to crawl the meta data. what is the solution for these pages? 401, so that the bots know these pages are behind a login? do we implement anything to ensure "no index", "no follow"? I searched the T'interwebs and couldn't find anything conclusive on this issue.
Technical SEO | | digitalez0 -
Has anyone used prbuzz.com for pr distribution?
Has anyone used prbuzz.com for pr distribution in an effort to boost SEO? I am attracted to their unlimited distribution for 1 price for the year. Does anyone have an opinion and or suggestion of another company. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | entourage2120 -
150 Duplicate page error
I am told that I have 150 duplicate page content. It seems that it is the login link on each of my pages. Is this an error? Is it something I have to change? Thanks Login/Register at http://irishdancingdress.com/wp-login.php?redirect_to=http%3A%2F%2Firishdancingdress.com%2Fdress
Technical SEO | | ukkpower0 -
Best 404 Error Checker?
I have a client with a lot of 404 errors from Web Master Tools, and i have to go through and check each of the links because Some redirect to the correct page Some redirect to another url but its a 404 error Some are just 404 errors Does anyone know of a tool where i can dump all of the urls and it will tell me If the url is redirected, and to where if the page is a 404 or other error Any tips or suggestions will be really appreciated! Thanks SEO Moz'rs
Technical SEO | | anchorwave0