Hwarf Nugen

Googlebot and FreeDNS from afraid.org

Posted on the February 27th, 2008 under Technology / Computing by jglemza

Back on January 8th I canceled my Dreamhost account and began hosting my site off of my cable modem. Only receiving ~15 hits a day I figured I might as well save myself $120 a year. So I chose freedns.afraid.org to host my DNS. They were free and had all the options that I wanted, including working with Tomato.

After the switch I noticed that my traffic had declined dramatically, down to ~1 hit per day. So I starting doing a bit of investigating and found that Google was no longer crawling my site and had deleted my previous results. Logging into the Google Webmaster Tools I found that Google was having DNS issues connecting to my site. Well, after pulling my hair out for an evening I found that FreeDNS was blocking the googlebot from crawling my site.

Solution: I have switched my DNS provider to ZoneEdit. ZoneEdit offers similar features to that of FreeDNS. Now Google can access my site again, but I’m no longer in the results for some searches. I guess it will take some time. Yahoo and Live search were totally unaffected by FreeDNS.

So this is a warning to all people using FreeDNS and want Google to crawl their site.