False Positive block on Google?

Google runs a lot of servers that aren’t a part of indexing your site, including proxies for image searches, Google translate, and other purposes. Domains ending in ‘googleusercontent.com’ are owned by Google, but aren’t used as part of Googlebot for indexing the site. If you check the access log for the site, you can see which 404s they were causing, to see if there is an issue.

-Matt R

Thanks Matt, I look at the access logs… MTN

Turns out “googleusercontent” is hitting hundreds of broken URLs, trying to hit images I removed from my site about 6 months ago along with trying to run a plugin I deleted months ago! Never thought Google would be yet another obnoxious bot using up my bandwidth for no reason. I guess I’ll just let Wordfence block this mysterious googlebot and hope for the best. Disappointing. At least this got me drilling deeper into my access logs. MTN

Matt or other Wordfence folks, are you sure this is from Google? I’m still getting hit by quite a few of these, all different IP numbers, and with the IP number REVERSED as the first part of the host name. The bot drops in, starts hitting non existent image files then is eventually blocked by my Wordfence frequency blocking.

Is it common to reverse the IP number to make hostnames?

Here is another one.

Mountain View, United States
IP: 104.154.31.82 [unblock] [make permanent]
Reason: Exceeded the maximum number of page not found errors per minute for humans.
Hostname: 82.31.154.104.bc.googleusercontent.com
Last blocked attempt to access the site was 5/7/2016 5:21:30 PM (1 day 16 hours ago).

It’s definitely “from” Google, but isn’t a regular Google crawler. The naming convention with the reversed IP address numbers is common for some of these (other companies do it too). Google owns a lot of things, and some act as a proxy for customer requests, some even host user content or sites. I’m not certain what this one is exactly, but if it’s doing suspicious things, it’s likely fine to leave it blocked.

-Matt R

MTN,

On your top post,you said “The IP resolves to Norway”

How one one resolve Proxy IP to find out where it originates from ?
What tool or site did you use ?

Thanks

Not sure why I came up with Norway back when I wrote that comment, sorry about that, could have been my own confusion. MTN