FeedFetcher-Google (impostor)'s food bowl
the bowl, as bots see itThe bowl is empty.
Identification
Its full user-agent string, exactly as it arrives at the gate:
This is not a real species. It is a costume: requests that use FeedFetcher-Google's name but fail reverse-DNS or IP-range checks against Google's network.
How it was checked: its reverse DNS must end in .google.com and resolve back to the same address, or the address must be in Google's published IP ranges. Each address is checked when it first visits, and the result is kept for a day.
How to block FeedFetcher-Google (impostor)
FeedFetcher-Google (impostor) does not read robots.txt, so a polite sign is wasted on it. Refuse it at your web server or firewall instead. User agents are easy to fake, so pair this with rate limiting.
# robots.txt will not stop FeedFetcher-Google (impostor). Block it at the server.
# nginx
if ($http_user_agent ~* "FeedFetcher-Google") {
return 403;
}The same thing on Apache:
# Apache (.htaccess)
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} FeedFetcher-Google [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Observed behaviour
Nothing on record in the last 30 days.
Requested 0 disallowed pages out of 0 requests. Never read robots.txt.
Has never followed the hidden link to /trap/. Either well trained or very lucky.
Where it comes from
Claims to be FeedFetcher-Google. Real FeedFetcher-Google traffic comes from Google's own network; these visits came from:
Nothing on record in the last 30 days.
Networks and countries come from the visitor's IP address, looked up in a local copy of the DB-IP database. The addresses themselves are never stored.
Questions site owners ask
Does FeedFetcher-Google (impostor) respect robots.txt?
We can't say yet. It has not fetched robots.txt here, and it has not touched a disallowed page either.
Will blocking FeedFetcher-Google (impostor) hurt my search rankings?
No. Nothing respectable will miss it.
How often does FeedFetcher-Google (impostor) visit?
Here, about 0 requests a day over the last week. Visits to your site depend on its size, how often it changes, and how many links point to it.