(17)
Since November 14th, I've been seeing a large uptick in complaints about Google Webmaster Tools reporting DNS issues with sites, leading to Google not being able to index sites fully.
There is a thread at WebmasterWorld and dozens at Google Webmaster Help.
In April, Google had a bug where they sent out false DNS errors to many webmasters and told everyone to ignore them. I am not sure if this is an issue with Google or something else.
The strange part is that it coincides with reports of ranking changes that I don't see myself.
I am going to try to get word from Google about the DNS issue and see if it was a bug and/or if it may be in any way related to the changes some tools noticed in regards to ranking fluctuations on November 14th.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and dozens at Google Webmaster Help.
Update: Google told me, "we're not seeing anything unusual on our end." :-)
Comments:
Sean Clark
11/19/2013 02:15 pm
Very timely thanks, we were just investigating this very thing for a client today. Look forward to your update.
Deven Jadav
11/19/2013 02:26 pm
I Think it was a very temporary issue rather then a bug, I too got DNS issue message in webmasters, Yet it got solved automatically immediately the next day. So no special efforts.
JustConsumer
11/19/2013 03:15 pm
There is nothing to investigate. Neither short DNS error nor bug in reports can't affect rankings.
Rick
11/19/2013 04:52 pm
I got this error for three of our sites. I haven't heard of any issues on our end though. So I am guessing it was a bug.
Christopher Meinck
11/19/2013 05:15 pm
Saw DNS issues and a drop in impressions on the 14th.
Shaun
11/19/2013 06:14 pm
Had DNS issues and a rankings drop on the 14th. No DNS issues before or after the 14th. I wouldn't normally associate the DNS issues with a rankings drop as we've had DNS issues before and rankings didn't change, however since other people are reporting the same I'm beginning to think the too are related.
ET
11/19/2013 07:32 pm
We also had DNS issues on the 14th, and the traffic drop followed today... Seems rather correlated, isn't it?
Sam
11/19/2013 11:32 pm
Along with the DNS issues spike, has anyone seen a huge spike in Not followed URLs on the same date? WMT lists them as URL errors, but they return a 200, get fetched fine, etc.
ManishK
11/20/2013 08:04 am
Hi Sam, We also have been noticing increase in Not Followed URLs but it is not on the same date but it started from the 1st week of November. All of them show as Response 302. Please share any findings that you have.
sunil kumar
11/20/2013 12:11 pm
i also got a message from Google webmaster about DNS Errors and Google not being able to index sites fully.
Andy
11/20/2013 03:11 pm
I also got this error for my personal site and a few client sites. It was definitely an issue on Google's end and not with the sites. The sites were hosted on different servers too so it wasn't localised.
Graciousstore
11/21/2013 04:28 am
Was the DNS error general or localized? I did not see any such error in my webmaster tools
Ed Pudol
11/25/2013 03:53 pm
I also encounter this problem and indexing of my site pages was stop since this appear. Any solution
moray
11/26/2013 01:47 pm
Same happened to me and it wasnt my server - traffic has been going downhill since
AJ Kohn
12/05/2013 04:34 pm
I saw this across all clients and have a feeling this has to do with the way in which Google/Chrome is resolving DNS as a reaction to NSA issues.
Manish Pandey
12/20/2013 12:05 pm
Hey Barry, Is there any update on this? Thanks.
Barry Schwartz
12/20/2013 12:06 pm
No