Why Does Google Try To Crawl When My Site Is Not Public?

Oct 20, 2008 - 8:24 am 0 by

A typical thread I see from time to time in the forums are from webmasters who see Googlebot trying to access their site, but their site is not publicly available.

For example, a Google Groups thread has a webmaster from davenjudy.org asking why does he see GoogleBot requests to his fubar.local.davenjudy.org when that page won't resolve?

The simple answer is because there may be links still pointing to that address.

In fact, in this case, Google's JohnMu said there is. A page has a link directly to that page, here is the link:

<a class="exlink" href="http://fubar.local.davenjudy.org" rel="nofollow">http://fubar.local.davenjudy.org</a>

With that link pointing to the page, GoogleBot will continue to crawl that link, from the linking page, until it is removed.

Is this an issue? John from Google explains, "When we find links, we'll try to follow them just in case there is something that is crawlable :). In your case, we aren't able to resolve DNS for the host name, so we leave it at that."

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
- YouTube
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: February 7, 2025

Feb 7, 2025 - 10:00 am
Search Video Recaps

Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google Volatility, Google Ads Quality Update, Google AI Overviews Updates & Other Search Engines

Feb 7, 2025 - 8:01 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google Says People Know When Author Bios Are For SEO Purposes

Feb 7, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google Ads

Google Ads Keyword Planner New Auto-Organize Keywords To Ad Groups

Feb 7, 2025 - 7:41 am
Google Maps

Google Business Profiles Reinstatements Now Include Case & 5 Upload Documents

Feb 7, 2025 - 7:31 am
Google Maps

Google Local Reviews Decreasing Over Past 24 Hours

Feb 7, 2025 - 7:25 am
Previous Story: Google Image Search October 2008 Update