Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Why would our server return a 301 status code when Googlebot visits from one IP, but a 200 from a different IP?
-
I have begun a daily process of analyzing a site's Web server log files and have noticed something that seems odd. There are several IP addresses from which Googlebot crawls that our server returns a 301 status code for every request, consistently, day after day. In nearly all cases, these are not URLs that should 301. When Googlebot visits from other IP addresses, the exact same pages are returned with a 200 status code.
Is this normal? If so, why? If not, why not?
I am concerned that our server returning an inaccurate status code is interfering with the site being effectively crawled as quickly and as often as it might be if this weren't happening.
Thanks guys!
-
Howdie,
Yes, I believe we got this sorted out. Interestingly, it wasn't any of the suggestions made here causing the 301 status code responses. I posted a thread in Google Webmaster Tools Forum regarding the issue and received a response that I am 99.5% sure is the correct answer.
Here is a link to that thread for future readers' reference: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!mydiscussions/webmasters/zOCDAVudxNo
I believe the underlying issue has to do with incorrect handling of a redirect for this domain: ccisound.com
I am currently pursuing getting it corrected with our IT Director. Once the remedy is in place, I should know right away if it solves the issue I am seeing in the server logs. I'll post back here once I am 100% certain that was the issue.
Thanks all! This has been an interesting one for me!
-
Hi Dana, have you definitively sorted this out?
-
They are pretty detailed, I'll send you yesterday's in a zip file so you can take a look. I'm certain that have everything needed. Thanks Eric!
-
Right, a DNS manager could do a redirect, but that would not be visible in the web server log. It would only be visible in whatever is managing the DNS.
-
Depends what kind of DNS manager you are using. A redirect via DNS can still be possible.
In my experience DNS managing software can redirect users with 301 or 302 headers depending on what settings you have. If your DNS manager has a security protocol along with redirect rules, it could be causing the issue.
Examples of DNS redirects:
-
The request headers will also show if any and what cookies the user may have set. Which it looks like is how your server determines if it should provide the client the desktop or mobile version.
-
How detailed are your log files? Can you see the user-agent (browser name) Maybe you could ask your IT department to log request headers? If that will make the log files too big, they can probably do it only for the 'problem' IPs, or only for cases that the webserver returns a 301. I'll take a look if you like. Email is in my profile.
Best,
-Eric
-
Thanks so much Eric. Yes, I was thinking about the mobile version of our site being related to what I'm seeing too. However, I am unaware that we 301 redirect anything from the main site to the mobile site. In fact, users can actually switch to the mobile site via desktop by clicking "Mobile Site" in the footer and then browse the mobile version of the site via desktop. All of the URLs are identical.
Just out of curiosity I browsed to the mobile version of our site, grabbed a URL and then plugged it into "Fetch as Googlebot" in GWT. For all options, including desktop and the three mobile options a status code of 200 was returned.
-
The problem can't be related to DNS. If the problem was related to DNS, the request would never make it to your server, and you would never see anything related to the request in your log files.
Because you can see it in your log file, it is definitely happening on your own webserver (not some external problem).
The requesting IP is probobly not the problem, but it could be if your server automatically adds to a banned list any IP that requests > X pages in Y time - your server might think this is a DOS (denial of service) attack.... But if your server was set up to do this, your IT guys would probobly know about it. This isn't something that is normally enabled 'out of the box' someone would need to intentionally activate a behavior like that.
More likely, is that there is another common denominator besides the requester IP... I would guess that it's the user agent string (the browser or device the user is using).
Taking a quick look at what I think is your site, you have a mobile version available. Google of course would be interested in what your site looks like to a mobile browser, and would send a 'fake' user agent string pretending to be so (a cell phone or a tablet etc...) If your server sees this request, and tries to automatically redirect the browser to the mobile version of the site, then you would have your 301 code (which in this case is exactly what you intended, so your all set!)
There are probably a few other cases that could cause a 301 for just some IPs, but this is the only one that comes to mind at the moment.
Good Luck!
-
Here is the response from my IT Director regarding the possibility that this is being done by our DNS manager:
"I do not believe so. Our DNS does translation of human readable names to IP address. It has nothing to do with the status being returned to a browser, and even if it did it could not write to the log file."
Is this accurate? I understand that the DNS cannot write to the log file, but if the DNS can flag a request to receive a certain status code from the server, then this scenario would still be a possibility.
-
According to our IT Director we have no spam filters, no mod_security module, absolutely nothing on our server to prevent it from being crawled by bot, human or spider from any IP address, including black-listed IPs.
To me, other than the obvious (no security is probably not a good idea at all), that means that the 301 status codes being returned because of a problem with server set up.
I do have server logs that I'd be willing to share privately with anyone who's willing to take a gander. Don't worry, I won't send you a month's worth. 1-2 days should be plenty.
In the meantime I am going to dive in and take a look further. It's entirely possible that IPs from Google are not the only ones receiving nothing but 301 status codes in response to requests.
-
Thanks William. Good suggestion. I am on it! I'll post back here once I know more.
-
I would not be surprised if this was done by your DNS. If you use a DNS manager, they could possibly redirect certain users or IPs based on patterns of visits.
I suggest finding out more about any server configurations from the admin and seeing who they use as a DNS provider or manager.
-
Excellent thoughts! Yes, they are consistently the same IP addresses every time. There are several producing the same phenomenon, so I looked at this one 66.249.79.174
According to what I can find online this is definitely Google and the data center is located in Mountain View, California. We are a USA company, so it seems unlikely that it is a country issue. It could be that this IP (and the others like it) are inadvertently being blocked by a spam filter.
It doesn't matter the day or time, every time Googlebot attempts to crawl from this IP address our server returns 301 status codes for every request, with no exceptions.
I am thinking I need to request a list of IP addresses being blocked by the server's spam filter. I am not a server administrator...would this be something reasonable for me to ask the people who set it up?
Is returning a 301 status code the best scenario for handling a bot attempting to disguise itself as googlebot? I would think setting the server up to respond with a 304 would be better? (Sorry, that's kind of a follow-up "side" question)
Let me know your thoughts and I'm going to go see if I can find out more about the spam filter.
-
Where are the 301s taking Googlebot on those IP addresses? And are they the same IP addresses every time? Have you narrowed those IP addresses down to any particular datacenter/country? It could be possible there is some configuration with your server that treats IP addresses differently depending on the country... it could also be that the IP addresses getting the 301s are known blacklisted spam IP addresses but are masking themselves as Googlebot so your server's blacklist software is keeping them out. It's really hard to say without looking into the data myself but I'm definitely interested in what you find out.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Difference hummingbird and rankbrain
From my understanding hummingbird is the fact that google is able to parse sentences and link entites to understand the meaning of content in a better way than with just keywords and rankbrain is about user intent, google understands that they are various ways to mean the same thing. Is my understanding correct ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
410 or 301 after URL update?
Hi there, A site i'm working on atm has a thousand "not found" errors on google console (of course, I'm sure there are thousands more it's not showing us!). The issue is a lot of them seem to come from a URL change. Damage has been done, the URLs have been changed and I can't stop that... but as you can imagine, i'm keen to fix as many as humanly possible. I don't want to go mad with 301s - but for external links in, this seems like the best solution? On the other hand, Google is reading internal links that simply aren't there anymore. Is it better to hunt down the new page and 301-it anyway? OR should I 410 and grit my teeth while google crawls and recrawls it, warning me that this page really doesn't exist? Essentially I guess I'm asking, how many 301s are too many and will affect our DA? And what's the best solution for dealing with mass 404 errors - many of which aren't attached or linked to from any other pages anymore? Thanks for any insights 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra0 -
Images Returning 404 Error Codes. 301 Redirects?
We're working with a site that has gone through a lot of changes over the years - ownership, complete site redesigns, different platforms, etc. - and we are finding that there are both a lot of pages and individual images that are returning 404 error codes in the Moz crawls. We're doing 301 redirects for the pages, but what would the best course of action be for the images? The images obviously don't exist on the site anymore and are therefore returning the 404 error codes. Should we do a 301 redirect to another similar image that is on the site now or redirect the images to an actual page? Or is there another solution that I'm not considering (besides doing nothing)? We'll go through the site to make sure that there aren't any pages within the site that are still linking to those images, which is probably where the 404 errors are coming from. Based on feedback below it sounds like once we do that, leaving them alone is a good option.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | garrettkite0 -
Different domains for multilingual website
Hey guys, A site that I'm currently working on as different domains for each website language. So for example: word1word2.com for the english version word3word4.com for the french version word5word6.com for spanish version .... Is it better to move all of the different languages to the same domain and use subfolders for each language /fr/... Please note that the domains being used bring in organic traffic as well as they are EMDs. Thank You.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruLee0 -
How To 301 Redirect .html pages
I need to redirect a page/URL that is purely .html to a new location. I don't know how to do this. All the redirects I can find are for server side code pages .php/.aspx etc. From my understanding I can't put a server side redirect in a .html file. I am hosting on a microsoft server, however the new page I am redirecting to is .php. I am running some WordPress (.php) files on the server. I need to make it redirect before the old page loads so visitors don't start reading something that is about to get redirected Can someone please help me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet0 -
301 Redirects After Company Acquisition
We recently acquired a company, and now we are going to redirect all of the pages on their site to their respective pages on our site. Do we need to keep the original pages on their site active? For how long? Ideally, we would like to redirect everything and remove the old site entirely so we don't have to pay to keep hosting it. Is this possible? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt1 -
301 redirect from .html to non .html?
Previously our site was using this as our URL structure: www.site.com/page.html. A few months ago we updated our URL structure to this: www.site.com/page & we're not using the .html. I've read over this guide & don't see anywhere that discusses this: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection. I've currently got a programmer looking into, but am always a bit weary with their workarounds, as I'd previously had them cause more problems then fix it. Here is the solution he is looking to do: The way that I am doing the redirect is fine. The problem is of where to put the code. The issue is that the files are .html files that need to be redirected to the same url with out a .html on them. I can see if I can add that to the 404 redirect page if there is one inside of there and see if that does the trick. That way if there is no page that exists without the .html then it will still be a 404 page. However if it is there then it will work as normal. I will see what I can find and get back. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, BJ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seointern0 -
Zero visits from keyword in Google Analytics
The keyword "business engagement in outsourcing" shows 0 visits. I have a look at Seomoz post at - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/advanced-google-analytics. According to it, "If someone makes more than one visit to a site within the same "session" and each visit comes from a search but on different keywords, then both keywords will be included in the keywords report - the first with 0 visits and the second with 1 visit" In my GA report, i could only see 0 visit for the above keyword. Why is 1 visit not being shown ? On reading the blog, http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/04/google-analytics-tips-and-tricks-why-do.html#axzz1UPqhMV7o i am more confused, as it says "Google Analytics, assigns the visitors activity to the first keyword " . which is NOT what seomoz suggests
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050