Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. How do I complete a reverse DNS check when completing log file analysis?

    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.

    How do I complete a reverse DNS check when completing log file analysis?

    Technical SEO
    2
    4
    717
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • daniel-brooks
      daniel-brooks Subscriber last edited by

      I'm doing some log file analysis and need to run a reverse DNS check to ensure that I'm analysing logs from Google and not any imposters. Is there a command I can use in terminal to do this?

      If not, whats the best way to verify Googlebot?

      Thanks

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • TylerReardon
        TylerReardon @daniel-brooks last edited by

        That's awesome! Glad to know there's a bulk tool out there!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • daniel-brooks
          daniel-brooks Subscriber @TylerReardon last edited by

          Hi Tyler,

          Thanks for your reply. I managed to get down to 98 unique IPs and ran a bulk reverse DNS/IP Look-up using this tool:

          https://www.infobyip.com/ipbulklookup.php

          Thanks for your help though!

          TylerReardon 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
          • TylerReardon
            TylerReardon last edited by

            Hey Daniel,

            If you want to verify that a user-agent is actually Googlebot, you'll want to use a log file analysis tool to aggregate all of the IP addresses associated with Googlebot. Once you have a list of IP addresses, you can perform a reverse DNS lookup to verify whether the IP addresses are actually associated with Googlebot or not.

            If you're on windows/pc these steps should work:
            https://www.serverintellect.com/support/dns/reverse-dns/

            If you're on mac try these steps:
            1. open Terminal
            2. type "host" + ip address
             for example: "host 66.249.66.1"
            3. hit enter
            4. view results. For example: "1.66.249.66.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer crawl-66-249-66-1.googlebot.com"

            If the results are from Google.com or Googlebot.com, you can be sure it's actually Google crawling your site. Unfortunately, I don't know of any faster ways to achieve these results. I'm sure there's a tool out there, I just haven't found it yet.

            This might also be a good resource for you: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en

            Good luck!
            -Tyler

            daniel-brooks 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • ufmedia

              Recommended log file analysis software for OS X?

              Due to some questions over direct traffic and Googlebot behavior, I want to do some log file analysis.  The catch is this is a Mac shop, so all our systems are on OS X.  I have Windows 8 running in an emulator, but for the sake of simplicity I'd rather run all my software in OS X. This post by Tim Resnik recommended Web Log Explorer, but it's for Windows only.  I did discover Sawmill, which claims to run on any platform. Any other suggestions?  Bear in mind our site is load balanced over three servers, so please take that into consideration.

              Technical SEO | | ufmedia
              0
            • DonnaDuncan

              Reverse IP Lookup

              I have a client that has over 90,000 incoming links from a single IP address. I can't figure out who's linking to them. I've used several different reverse IP lookup tools and can tell that the server is in Europe and ISP is AT&T Global Network Services Nederland B.V.. (http://www.ip-adress.com/reverse_ip/194.196.0.36) Says there's 0 hosts on that IP. Any suggestions?

              Technical SEO | | DonnaDuncan
              0
            • Dan-Lawrence

              Creating a CSV file for uploading 301 redirect URL map

              Hi if i'm bulk uploading 301 redirects whats needed to create a csv file? is it just a case of creating an excel spreadsheet & have the old urls in column A and new urls in column B and then just convert to csv and upload ? or do i need to put in other details or paremeters etc etc ? Cheers Dan

              Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
              0
            • ulefos

              Remove html file extension and 301 redirects

              Hi Recently I ask for some work done on my website from a company,  but I am not sure what they've done is right.
              What I wanted was html file extensions to be removed like
              /ash-logs.html to /ash-logs
              also the index.html to www.timports.co.uk
              I have done a crawl diagnostics and have duplicate page content and 32 page title duplicates. This is so doing my head in please help This is what is in the .htaccess file <ifmodule pagespeed_module="">ModPagespeed on
              ModPagespeedEnableFilters extend_cache,combine_css, collapse_whitespace,move_css_to_head, remove_comments</ifmodule> <ifmodule mod_headers.c="">Header set Connection keep-alive</ifmodule> <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews</ifmodule> DirectoryIndex index.html RewriteEngine On 
               # Rewrite valid requests on .html files  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f RewriteRule ^ %{REQUEST_URI}.html?rw=1 [L,QSA] 
               # Return 404 on direct requests against .html files RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .html$  
              RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !rw=1 [NC]
               RewriteRule ^ - [R=404] AddCharset UTF-8 .html # <filesmatch “.(js|css|html|htm|php|xml|swf|flv|ashx)$”="">#SetOutputFilter DEFLATE #</filesmatch> <ifmodule mod_expires.c="">ExpiresActive On
              ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 years"
              ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 years"
              ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 years"
              ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 years"
              ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 years"
              ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 years"
              ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 years"
              ExpiresByType application/javascript "access 1 years"
              ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 years"</ifmodule> <files 403.shtml="">order allow,deny allow from all</files> redirect 301 /PRODUCTS http://www.timports.co.uk/kiln-dried-logs
              redirect 301 /kindling_firewood.html http://www.timports.co.uk/kindling-firewood.html
              redirect 301 /about_us.html http://www.timports.co.uk/about-us.html
              redirect 301 /log_delivery.html http://www.timports.co.uk/log-delivery.html redirect 301 /oak_boards_delivery.html http://www.timports.co.uk/oak-boards-delivery.html
              redirect 301 /un_edged_oak_boards.html http://www.timports.co.uk/un-edged-oak-boards.html
              redirect 301 /wholesale_logs.html http://www.timports.co.uk/wholesale-logs.html redirect 301 /privacy_policy.html http://www.timports.co.uk/privacy-policy.html redirect 301 /payment_failed.html http://www.timports.co.uk/payment-failed.html redirect 301 /payment_info.html http://www.timports.co.uk/payment-info.html

              Technical SEO | | ulefos
              1
            • Nightwing

              Does Bing ignore robots txt files?

              Bonjour from "Its a miracle is not raining" Wetherby Uk 🙂 Ok here goes... Why despite a robots text file excluding indexing to site http://lewispr.netconstruct-preview.co.uk/ is the site url being indexed in Bing bit not Google? Does bing ignore robots text files or is there something missing from http://lewispr.netconstruct-preview.co.uk/robots.txt I need to add to stop bing indexing a preview site as illustrated below. http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/preview-bing-indexed.jpg Any insights welcome 🙂

              Technical SEO | | Nightwing
              0
            • ufmedia

              How to rewrite WordPress permalinks for reverse proxy?

              Our main site, www.domain.com, is on an IIS 6 server.  When we started our blog, we wanted to put it in a subdirectory (domain.com/blog), but we couldn't because our IT people refused to support it.  Instead, we built it on a third-party Apache server and configured it to open under blog.domain.com.  However, I came across this SEOmoz post about the glories of reverse proxies, so I've persuaded our IT people to take a swing at it. We got it to work on a staging server, but the permalinks won't change (still appear as blog.domain.com/slug).  The IT guys say it's due to a configuration problem with WordPress.  Can somebody out there point me in the right direction as far as working out the URL issues with this?

              Technical SEO | | ufmedia
              0
            • stephen_reply

              Changing DNS -- SEO implications?

              Hey Moz, We're migrating an old site on an old server over to a new server/DNS. The plan is to keep the same URL structure and reuse our existing URL's. As long as we make minimal changes to each page's content, we should be able to update our DNS entry and get all the pages recreated and assigned to their correct URLs without any reduction in SEO rankings. Is this correct? This site gets a lot of organic traffic and ranks highly on some challenging keywords, so it's key that we retain our rankings as much as possible. I've read that it's wise to lower the DNS time-to-live to one hour, about a day before the move, to help Google crawl the DNS a little quicker. Are there any other recommendations you guys can offer or past experiences?

              Technical SEO | | stephen_reply
              0
            • elephantseo

              What tool do you use to check for URLs not indexed?

              What is your favorite tool for getting a report of URLs that are not cached/indexed in Google & Bing for an entire site? Basically I want a list of URLs not cached in Google and a seperate list for Bing. Thanks, Mark

              Technical SEO | | elephantseo
              3

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            • Digital Marketers
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.