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
-
What to do with 404 errors when you don't have a similar new page to 301 to ??
Hi If you have 404 errors for pages that you dont have similar content pages to 301 them to, should you just leave them (the 404's are optimised/qood quality with related links & branding etc) and they will eventually be de-indexed since no longer exist or should you 'remove url' in GWT ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Can anyone recommend a wordpress forum for commercial theme help
Hi, i am trying to find a forum for wordpress when you have bought a commercial theme. I am looking at learning how to change a site for a better user experience and for better seo but there does not seem to be any wordpress forums that i can find for when people have bought a commercial theme any help in finding one would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
What does this error mean?
We recently merged our Google + & Google Local pages and sent a request to Webmaster tools to connect the Google + page to our website. The message was successfully sent. However, when clicking the 'Approve or reject this request' link, the following error message appears: 'Can't find associate request' Anyone know what we are doing incorrectly? Thanks in advance for any insight.
Technical SEO | | SEOSponge0 -
500 Server Error on RSS Feed
Hi there, I am getting multiple 500 errors on my RSS feed. Here is the error: <dt>Title</dt> <dd>500 : Error</dd> <dt>Meta Description</dt> <dd>Traceback (most recent call last): File "build/bdist.linux-x86_64/egg/downpour/init.py", line 391, in _error failure.raiseException() File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/twisted/python/failure.py", line 370, in raiseException raise self.type, self.value, self.tb Error: 500 Internal Server Error</dd> <dt>Meta Robots</dt> <dd>Not present/empty</dd> <dt>Meta Refresh</dt> <dd>Not present/empty</dd> Any ideas as to why this is happening, they are valid feeds?
Technical SEO | | mistat20000 -
403 forbidden error website
Hi Mozzers, I got a question about new website from a new costumer http://www.eindexamensite.nl/. There is a 403 forbidden error on it, and I can't find what the problem is. I have checked on: http://gsitecrawler.com/tools/Server-Status.aspx
Technical SEO | | MaartenvandenBos
result:
URL=http://www.eindexamensite.nl/ **Result code: 403 (Forbidden / Forbidden)** When I delete the .htaccess from the server there is a 200 OK :-). So it is in the .htaccess. .htaccess code: ErrorDocument 404 /error.html RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^home$ / [L]
RewriteRule ^typo3$ - [L]
RewriteRule ^typo3/.$ - [L]
RewriteRule ^uploads/.$ - [L]
RewriteRule ^fileadmin/.$ - [L]
RewriteRule ^typo3conf/.$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
RewriteRule .* index.php Start rewrites for Static file caching RewriteRule ^(typo3|typo3temp|typo3conf|t3lib|tslib|fileadmin|uploads|screens|showpic.php)/ - [L]
RewriteRule ^home$ / [L] Don't pull *.xml, *.css etc. from the cache RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^..xml$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^..css$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^.*.php$ Check for Ctrl Shift reload RewriteCond %{HTTP:Pragma} !no-cache
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Cache-Control} !no-cache NO backend user is logged in. RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !be_typo_user [NC] NO frontend user is logged in. RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !nc_staticfilecache [NC] We only redirect GET requests RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} GET We only redirect URI's without query strings RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ We only redirect if a cache file actually exists RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/typo3temp/tx_ncstaticfilecache/%{HTTP_HOST}/%{REQUEST_URI}/index.html -f
RewriteRule .* typo3temp/tx_ncstaticfilecache/%{HTTP_HOST}/%{REQUEST_URI}/index.html [L] End static file caching DirectoryIndex index.html CMS is typo3. any ideas? Thanks!
Maarten0 -
404 Errors - How to get rid of them?
Hi, I am starting an SEO job on an academic site that has been completely redone. The SEOMoz crawl detected three 404 Errors to pages that cannot be found anywhere on either Joomla or the server. What can I do to solve this? Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | michalseo0 -
Strange Top URLs for Keywords in Google Webmaster Tools
When we click on one of our keywords under the keywords section of Google Webmaster Tools it shows our top URLs for that keyword. The problem is that it is giving us some very strange URLs that we have searched high and low to try to find but we don't know where they came from. Here is a screenshot: http://bit.ly/pl6mB3 Do you know where this type of URL string could have originated and how to fix it?
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan0