Fixing "Googlebot can't access your site" Aug 19, 2011

Got this email from Google about one of our websites recently:

Googlebot can't access your site

Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered XX errors while attempting to connect to your site. Your site's overall connection failure rate is XX%. You can see more details about these errors in Webmaster Tools.

...

After you think you've fixed the problem, use "Fetch as Google" to verify that Googlebot can properly access your site.


The site was loading fine from all possible locations so I tried this "Fetch as Google" thing. Which resulted in an endless "pending" status that finally turned into "Failed":


I spent hours trying to investigate and finally found a solution. So if you ever bump into this, here goes

The cause


It was the old Google Analytics tracking code. Somehow it blocked Googlebot from indexing your website in some cases.

The solution


Just upgrade to the new, asynchronous tracking code and use the "Fetch as Google" tool once again.

6 comments:

kishore raja said...

Hi blogger, will it effect on site Visitors ??????

Tim Trott said...

It sounds more like Google's detection does not allow enough time for response from the target and any amount of net traffic can cause it to miss the connection. These things just started and the reports seem somewhat random in nature, reporting large code-laden sites equally with simple HTML pages.

Phtoshop Tutorials said...

I have the same problem. When I do fetch as Google it is completing successfully. But I can see a warning sign under DNS.

Anonymous said...

Thnx, this solution helped perfectly. :-)

Adi said...

Thanx, it work for me to ! :)

I try to fix this problem for days and I ask the hosting provider and they didn't know how to help!

Thanx again!

Anonymous said...

Excellent

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