Does Google have a DNS problem?

Author: Bill Marshall

Date Published: 17 September 2007, 12:00

Reports are circulating of a possible problem that is affecting some sites and causing their pages not to be crawled as often as they should. Details are still scarce but the main symptoms apart from reduced crawling appear to be messages in Google Webmaster Tools saying that Googlebot can't access the home page and "URL timeout: DNS lookup timeout" errors.

What isn't clear is whether this is a problem at Google's end or a more general problem. Since the reports appear to be coming from different places and Hosting centres the suspicion is that it it's the former. This seems to be strengthened by the other major search engine Spiders crawling normally.

Since it appears to have coincided with a fluctuation in rankings on many otherwise stable sites there is understandable concern amongst site owners who depend on Google sourced Traffic for their income. Let's hope whatever the problem is can be traced and addressed quickly.