Ken Kimball discusses what to do after receiving an email from Google stating “Googlebot Can’t Access Your Site.”

(Voted One Of The Best Website Design Companies In Bangor, Maine Since 2009 – Links Web Design)

Video Transcription

Hey, everyone. It’s Ken Kimball from Links Web Design. This morning, we want to talk about one of the scariest emails a website owner can get, “Googlebot can’t access your site.”

What is Googlebot?

Googlebot is this program that goes around and actually downloads people’s websites. The reason why it does that is that when you do a Google search, you’re not actually searching the Internet. You’re searching Google’s copy of the Internet. Google wants to always make sure it has a recent copy. It’s always scanning websites and downloading new content.

What would cause Googlebot not to be able to access your website?

Well, the first, most obvious reason is your website is down. The next thing, maybe there’s a node between Googlebot and your website that’s down. The Internet’s made up of all kinds of interconnected nodes.

If one of those nodes is down between you and Google, there’s no alternative path. That could cause problems for Google. You could receive this email. Another one is you could have a distributed denial-of-service software installed or an intrusion detection system. One of those could potentially misidentify Googlebot as an intruder and block access.

The other thing is, sometimes, Googlebot just doesn’t work right. There’s been a few instances over the past few years where Googlebot hasn’t been able to access any websites. If you go onto the Webmaster Tools forums, you can see people having discussions when that happens. It’s pretty easy to follow up to see if there’s an issue like that going on.

What should you do if you get this email?

Well, the first thing is to check your website. Make sure it’s up and active. Make sure that you’re able to access it. If you are, chances are, other people are able to. The next time that Google comes back, it will be able to as well.

The next thing you can do is log into Webmaster Tools. If you look at that email that Google sent you, there’s actually a link to log into Webmaster Tools. If you do that, there are several little diagnostic things you can run just to make sure that everything works properly. You can actually see a graph over time that tells you any errors that Google had indexing your site over the past 12 months.

The next thing you should do if you can’t access your website or Webmaster Tools gives you errors is contact your provider. See what they have for resources. Maybe there’s something wrong with the server. Maybe there’s something wrong with the data center. It’s something that they can take a look at.

The Last Thing

If you just received this one email, you can probably just wait, see if you get a second one. If this becomes systemic and you get a lot of these emails, you might want to think about taking more drastic action.

So just to kind of wrap up. It’s a bit of a scary email the first time you get it. There are definitely some actionable items you can take to make sure that everything’s okay. As long as you’re not getting them on a regular basis, you’re probably just fine.