Has anyone else gotten strange WMT errors recently?

[MarieHaynes]

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?

[ThompsonPaul]

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

[MarieHaynes]

Yikes. That would not be good!

[EGOL]

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.

[MarieHaynes]

Thx.  All checks out well on the dns check.  I'm calling this a bug.

[jesse-landry]

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.

[Branagan]

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.

[MarieHaynes]

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.

[jesse-landry]

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!