Google Updates Googlebot Verification Documentation

Google up to date their Search Central Documentation to on verifying Googlebot, including documentation about user-triggered bot visits, data that was lacking from earlier Googlebot documentation, which has created confusion for a few years, with some publishers blocking the IP ranges of the official visits.

Table of Contents

Newly Up to date Bot Documentation

Google added a brand new documentation that categorizes the three completely different sorts of bots that publishers ought to count on.

These are the three classes of Google Bots:

Googlebot – Search crawler
Particular-case crawlers
Person-triggered fetchers (GoogleUserContent)

That final one, GoogleUserContent is one which’s confused publishers for a very long time as a result of Google didn’t have any documentation about it.

That is what Google says about GoogleUserContent:

“Person-triggered fetchers

Instruments and product capabilities the place the top person triggers a fetch.

For instance, Google Web site Verifier acts on the request of a person.

As a result of the fetch was requested by a person, these fetchers ignore robots.txt guidelines.”

The documentation states that the reverse DNS masks will present the next area:

“***-***-***-***.gae.googleusercontent.com”

Up to now, what I used to be advised by some within the search engine optimisation group, is that bot exercise from IP addresses related to GoogleUserContent.com was triggered when a person seen a web site by a translate perform that was within the search outcomes, a characteristic that now not exists in Google’s SERPs.

I don’t know if that’s true or not. It was sufficient to know that it was a go to from Google, triggered by customers.

Google’s new documentation explains that bot exercise from IP addresses related to GoogleUserContent.com will be triggered by the Google Web site Verifier software.

However Google doesn’t say what else would possibly set off a bot from the GoogleUserContent.com IP addresses.

The opposite change within the documentation is a reference to googleusercontent.com within the context of IP addresses which are assigned to the area identify, GoogleUserContent.com.

That is the brand new textual content:

“Confirm that the area identify is both googlebot.com, google.com, or googleusercontent.com.”

One other new addition is the next textual content which was expanded from the outdated web page:

“Alternatively, you may determine Googlebot by IP deal with by matching the crawler’s IP deal with to the lists of Google crawlers’ and fetchers’ IP ranges:

Googlebot

Particular crawlers like AdsBot

Person triggered fetches”

Google Bot Identification Documentation

The brand new documentation lastly has one thing about bots that use IP addresses which are related to GoogleUserContent.

Search Entrepreneurs had been confused by these IP addresses and assumed that these bots had been spam.

A Google Search Console Assist dialogue from 2020 exhibits how confused individuals had been about exercise related to GoogleUserContent.

Many in that dialogue rightly concluded that it was not Googlebot however then mistakenly concluded that it was a faux bot pretending to be Google.

A person posted:

“The behaviour I see coming from these addresses could be very shut (if not equivalent) to official Googlebot behaviour, and it hits a number of websites of ours.

…If it isn’t – then this appears to point there’s widespread malicious bot exercise by somebody attempting fairly arduous to appear to be Google on our websites which is regarding.”

After a number of responses the one that began the dialogue concludes that the GoogleUserContent exercise was spam.

They wrote:

“…The Googlebots in query do mimic the official Person-Brokers, however because it stands the proof appears to level to them being faux.

I’ll block them for now.”

Now we all know that bot exercise from IPs related to GoogleUserContent will not be spam or hacker bots.

They are surely from Google. Publishers who’re at present blocking IP addresses related to GoogleUserContent ought to in all probability unblock them.

The present listing of User Triggered Fetcher IP addresses is available here.

Learn Google’s up to date documentation:

Verifying Googlebot and other Google crawlers

Featured picture by Shutterstock/Asier Romero