Bot IP Address List – How to Verify That a Bot is a Googlebot

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bot IP address list

A bot IP address list is a set of IP addresses used by bad bots or used by web servers to identify bad bots. The list typically works by checking a bot’s user agent or IP address against a set of allowlists. A bot management strategy based on allowlists will allow good bots to access a web property while blocking the bad ones.

Customers want to block rogue bots from crawling their sites because they can cause the site to slow down or go offline and also affect Analytics data leading to inaccurate conclusions. They also want to allow Googlebot to access their sites because that will reward their SEO efforts in Google Search. However, it’s important to know whether a specific bot is really Googlebot or not.

Cracking the Code: Navigating the World of Bot IP Address Lists

The best way to verify that a particular bot is indeed a Googlebot is to run a forward DNS lookup against the requesting IP address and match the result against the list of verified Googlebot IP addresses that Fraudlogix has made public. This approach requires a bit more work than using the Blackhole Pro plugin to check a bot’s reported user agent against a whitelist of strings that should never be blocked, but it will provide much better verification. This method can be extended to other user agents if needed by adding more entries to the list of valid strings that should always pass through Blackhole Pro. This approach can be supplemented with more advanced bot detection methods like JavaScipt Device Fingerprinting that can look at over 300 data points about a user’s devices and behavior to provide more detailed and comprehensive verification of user agents than just matching against a list of known good and bad bots.

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