Googlebot being block
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Out of all the security plugins I’ve tried WordFence has been my favorite. However, since activating it Googlebot can’t access your site. I’ve looked through the forums and there have been similar or the same problems but I’m still struggling to find a solution. Any help will be greatly appreciated! 🙂
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Hi Matt,
This is an issue that the team is investigating. I don’t have any new information to add at this time but please know we are working to resolve it.
Thanks!
Brian@matt19: Can you tell me what hosting company you are using? This seems to be an issue with reverse DNS lookups, but we’re trying to find out if there are any common factors among the few people who have reported the issue.
In some cases, it might be settings that need to be changed, if your host uses a reverse proxy like Varnish, or if you are using CloudFlare. If you view the Live Traffic page on the Wordfence menu, do you see your own IP address for your own visits? (You may have to visit in a second browser where you are not logged in, or look at the Logins and Logouts tab, to see your most recent login.)
-Matt R
Thanks for the quick replies fellas, I really appreciate it! @wfmattr we are on a dedicated server through Bluehost. I don’t think they’re using a reverse proxy.
Looking through the Login and Logouts of the live feed I do not see our IP.
Hope that helps. If you need anymore info let me know.
-Matt
Thanks for the details. Normally, you should see your own IP on the logins and logouts tab. This might mean Wordfence can’t see the correct IPs for visitors.
Do you see a different IP that might belong to your hosting company instead?
-Matt R
No, don’t believe any of the IP’s are related to us or our hosting provider. I wish I could give you more information but I’m still new to all this kind of stuff.
-Matt
I’m going to be contacting BlueHost, is there any information I should be asking them to help resolve this problem?
Thanks,
-MattYou can ask them if there is a reverse proxy, just to be sure. I did also see a problem with BlueHost once, where there was a proxy, but the support person did not know it was being used, and the user couldn’t fix it in their site’s control panel. If they can verify the IP that your site is supposed to have, and make sure that is the same IP your DNS records point to, that may help. (Nothing against BlueHost here — I don’t usually see problems from their setup.)
If you can tell me the IP you are seeing on Wordfence’s “Logins and Logouts” tab on the Live Traffic when you log in/out, I could check that out too. If you don’t want to post it here, you can email it to me at mattr (at) wordfence.com — please include a link to this post, if you do.
-Matt R
Sorry about the long delay. The guys at Bluehost helped me to change some of the settings in WordFence and I wanted to give it some time to see if googlebot would access our sites. They still can’t.
There is no reverse proxy. And the IP is correct and points to the correct DNS records.
I can email those Logins and Logouts if you’d like but I think because we use InfiniteWP to login and out is why our IP isn’t showing up. But I could be wrong.
-Matt
No problem about the delay — this sounds like a different issue from the one that the dev team was investigating, which has since been fixed.
If you’re using InfiniteWP, that’s correct that your own IP may not show up. Alternately, you can either try visiting the site in another browser where you are not logged into the site, to see if those visits are tracked.. if Live Traffic is disabled and you only see the logins and logouts tab, you could manually log into the site in the regular way, just to generate the Live Traffic log records.
You could also enable Live Traffic, and just visit the site without logging in. You might have to disable caching temporarily in that case.
Do you have Google search console (formerly Webmaster Tools) connected to the site? It may be helpful to try the option they have where you can fetch and render a page as Google sees it. If you do see a message there, the text should help, and if you disable Wordfence temporarily and try the same process on a second page, showing if the message changed will also help.
-Matt R
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