Trying to get to the bottom of this issue with a multiple site ban. (more info
here [webmasterworld.com]) One thing that links all these sites is the firewall policy. Lately, I've been adding entire subnets to my iptables' DENY rules. I've been monitoring suspicious behaviors in my sites' logs and have been adding subnets that belonged to AWS, Web hosting companies and some especially often offending internet providers from Far East. The reasoning was that a real visitor can't actually come from a cloud (AWS) or a web hosting IP unless they are browsing behind a proxy and if they are behind a proxy, they're usually up to no good.
In any case, I was very careful to avoid banning IPs belonging to Google, Yahoo, Bing and a handful of other important SEs. Indeed, Googlebot is still feasting happily on my pages, 50,000+ a day. However, I would have no idea if the infamous Google manual reviewers are browsing via a proxy or a VPN. Are they known to be evasive or are they guaranteed to come from a Google IP?
Does a scenario like this sound probable to you guys: a site gets queued for review for whatever reason. The reviewer can't get to it and bans it just in case?
