Does Googlebot Have Port 80 Open?

[tez899]

Might be a stupid question - Googlebot, does it have port 80 open? We need to cut down on serious SPAM issues and this *should* help in the process.

[Lord Majestic]

The answer to this is no - port 80 is usually open on the sites that are being crawled by Googlebot (and other bots), on the side of the bot a high port is open and it is fairly random but it won't be port 80.

[Receptional Andy]

Is there a particular reason you want to verify this port?

If it's to try to avoid fake Googlebot traffic, you may be interested in the thread How to Verify Googlebot [webmasterworld.com] which is linked from the Hot Topics [webmasterworld.com] thread (pinned on the front page of the Google forum).

[tez899]

Thanks for the quick replies. We've had lots of proxy hijacking amongst lots of other bull**** so we're tightening up site security because it seems like every mofo is spamming us.

[Receptional Andy]

Once again, hot topics [webmasterworld.com] is your friend ;)

In particular the section under 'Defending your rankings' which includes a detailed thread on proxy hijacking [webmasterworld.com].

[ayalon]

There are also a lot of good tools out there which can help you in this proces. I don't know if i can mention it here, but "bad behaviour" helped me out a lot...