Googlebot IPs are disabled by iThemes Security

  • Hi,
    I use iThemes Security and
    Yoast SEO
    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wordpress-seo/
    on most of my sites.
    I found that iTSec used to ban search engine bots (Google, Bing), because they are trying to find files which don’t exist.

    This affects my site’s SEO and organic traffic very much!

    Is there a best practice, an iTSec / Yoast documentation about how to avoid banning these bots?
    I think both iTSec and Yoast SEO is a respected and widely used plugin in their operational area, so I think it is both side’s interest to find a solution.

    ITSec might use such a whitelist of search engine bot IPs like it uses
    Hackrepair.com’s blacklist.
    Every cloaker solution has its search engine bot database…

    So pls. recommend a better solution than adding those bot IPs to iTSec whitelist, one by one, manually, after they were banned by iTSec…

    Thanks,
    Best,
    V.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • I’m having this problem too. It’s really annoying getting Googlebot servers banned, and as you said it affects our website SEO. As a temporal measure I have disabled 404 detection, but we need a more handy solution.

    Hi,
    not sure if this can help. So in the doubt, I just write it.

    One thing I did is to add IP’s from Google Bots into the IP White list in the Global settings Section. You can find easily the ip list online and just copy and paste.

    Also (as best practice too) I would check each url what provokes a 404 and make a redirection.

    Cheers
    Donald

    Thread Starter Vane

    (@vanetreg)

    I still don’t believe there’s not any single support response for this thread.
    Not even talking about a response but a solution.

    iThemes Security has a very similar solution for checking Hackrepair’s blacklist, and what I request is similarly check a whitelist of the most used search engine bot IPs.

    It shouldn’t even have to be real time, the daily 1-4 refresh of (automatically downloaded) whitelist would be just enough…

    I Noticed it. Quite a shift in serps on google when enabled ithemes. currently have the 404 detection disabled as a workaround.

    The only thing I can think is delete iThemes and do all the security patches it lists via other means. I’ve yet to do this but certainly thinking along these lines.

    This is a challenge since I face the same issue about site https://jamestaiwo.com

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • The topic ‘Googlebot IPs are disabled by iThemes Security’ is closed to new replies.