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It turns out that the Magento patch did NOT fix the problem.  We are still receiving tens of thousands of 503 errors when Googlebot requests a page.  The site is not down.  I can look in the access_log and see that the request was responded to with a 503 error.

Any ideas?  This has to be killing our chances for organic traffic until this gets resolve.

Hi Robert,

Thanks for the response.   It turns out that this is due to a bug in our hosting software, Magento, that results in googlebot not being handled correctly.  Apparently there's a patch that's being tested now.

Thanks,

Chris

I was just checking Google Webmaster Tools for one of the first times (I know this should have been a regular habit).

I noticed that on Feb 8th we had almost 80K errors of type 503.  This is obviously very alarming because as far as I know our site was up and available that whole day.  This makes me wonder if there is a firewall issue or something else that I'm not aware of.

Any ideas for the best way to determine what's causing this?

Thanks,

Chris