DNS errors

What is a DNS error?

A DNS error means that Googlebot can't communicate with the DNS server either because the server is down, or because there’s an issue with the DNS routing to your domain.

Specific errors you might see include:

While most DNS warnings or errors don’t affect Googlebot's ability to access your site, they may be a symptom of high latency, which can negatively impact your users.

How to deal with DNS errors

  • Make sure Google can crawl your site.
    Use Fetch as Google on a key page, such as your home page. If it returns the content of your homepage without problems, you can assume that Google is able to access your site properly.
  • For persistent or re-occuring DNS errors, check with your DNS provider.
    Often your DNS provider and your web hosting service are the same. 
  • Configure your server to respond to non-existent hostnames with an HTTP error code such as 404 or 500.
    A website such as example.com can be configured with a wildcard DNS setup to respond to requests for foo.example.com, made-up-name.example.com and any other subdomain. This makes sense in the case where a site with user-generated content gives each user account its own domain (http://username.example.com). However, in some cases, this kind of configuration can cause content to be unnecessarily duplicated across different hostnames, and it can also affect Googlebot’s crawling.


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