I've got a site that gbot can't access, and as a result it's been completely de-indexed, none of my backlinks show up anymore, and as far as google is concerned it doesn't even exist. I'm in way over my head here, and I'm hoping someone can help me figure out what I need to do to fix this problem. There's no indication the site's been penalized for any reason, and no reason why it should be. I use Adwords for this site, so frankly I've been lazy and haven't paid any attention at all to organic traffic. But recently I started to do some serious article publishing to work on organic traffic, and then I visited its Webmaster Tools acct. for the first time in ages. Under 'Web Crawl Errors' it listed maybe 7 urls with this 'network unreachable' error. And the last time gbot successfully accessed my home page (which happens to be my sales page) was May '07! WTools also alerted me to the fact I needed a sitemap and robots.txt file, so that's the first thing I did. I got an OK on the sitemap status, but after about a week there were even more unreachable urls, along with the following Warning message: This is all new to me, so I started doing some reading. Then I contacted my host and asked them to check that their firewall wasn't blocking the gbot. They restarted the firewall, that was 4 days ago, and now there are yet more unreachable urls and the Warning message is still there. I tried to figure out what IP google was using to access my site (totally clueless!), and I *think* I figured it out by process of elimination (but not 100% sure). Anyway, my host said there were no errors for that IP, and that I should check with G to make sure they don't have the IP blocked. Here's something that's a possible clue, although I don't know what it might mean: Until recently, this was the only website I had on this (shared) server. But a couple of weeks ago I added another website, and all the pages on the new site are indexed now. If the IP was blocked, then the site wouldn't get indexed, right...? However, none of the article marketing I've been doing since 1/29 has resulted in any backlinks showing up for this new site, so I don't know. Does it normally take this long before backlinks show up? But before I contact google about a possible blocked IP, I first need to make certain that I gave the right IP to my host to check out. So my FIRST question for all you experts here is: How the heck do you do find out exactly what IP google is using?? During a search I got one clue: use 'user-agents.' Not very helpful for me, I'm afraid, lol. Needless to say, I'm not an expert on this stuff. The little I do know comes from being able to read and follow directions carefully, but sometimes that just isn't enough. And I think this is definitely one of those times... If anyone has any guidance, thoughts, tips, bright ideas, I'd be extremely grateful for the help.
Wow, thanks for that list, budhanes! And guess what? The IP I gave to my host is on that list, so I guess I'm not quite as clueless as I thought! lol Although there has GOT to be an easier way than the one I used to figure that part out... But it doesn't matter now - sounds like one possible scenario has been ruled out, anyway. In a way that's worse, though - now I *really* don't know what my next step should be.
Just sent you a pm, ssandecki. And no, there aren't any 404 errors, just this mysterious 'network unreachable' error... LOVE your avatar. Made me laugh.