I would like to implement a pagerank script on a website. In other words, a cron job would check for the PR of certain url's from time to time directly from google. The problem is that the php script that does this is not allowed from my current webhost to make requests to google. If I get a dedicated IP address for the domain, would that solve this issue?
Ask your web host about it since it seems that they might have banned google IP(like hostgator banned googlebot)
No, it's the other way around. Google can access the site with no problem, but toolbar requests made to google from the site get a kind of "access denied" response. The php script works fine from localhost (my computer, my IP), but from the webhost it doesn't.
Well check if php allow_url_fopen flag is enabled. Also try using an alternate google DC IP to query...
Got hosting on a different server, now it works Thanks for the sending requests to other google DCs tip . Although if a certain IP is banned on one datacenter, it should only be a matter of time before the others ban it too. At least that would be logical.