IP's that wont resolve to a host name

[Kamin]

I have a site that is not being picked up by google or any other search engine. And I believe I have figured out why. This is just an example. These are not actual urls or IP address's. Say for example...

www.domainname.com resolves to the IP address of 255.255.255.255 which is a paid for dedicated static IP. Not virtual hosting.

But when you resolve the IP 255.255.255.255 it returnes an error of "IP could not be resolved" (Obviously this is a simple DNS issue)

Would the IP not resolving to a host name properly prevent the site from being crawled by google and other search engines? Would google and other search engines consider this cloaking of some kind? I searched through the webmaster forums and I haven't seen anyone bring up an issue such as this, that's why im asking.

Before Dominic the site had a PR5 and had a couple of high rankings, but I believe the hosting provider changed something and is causing the site to not be picked up again because of this issue. The site is over 8 months old.

Thanks for your input.
Kamin

[Balboa]

I believe the lack of a reverse DNS can cause problems, as it's often used by security processes (not necessarily by Google; I can't say if it's caused you to drop out, of course).

Sometimes this information takes time to propagate - but I'd ask your provider to look into it for you, if I were you.

[incywincy]

although you say you have a dedicated ip address, this behaviour is typical for virtually hosted domains sharing an ip address. my website is virtually hosted and attempting a reverse lookup fails.

i have never (touch wood!) had spidering problems with google.

[swones]

If you ever intend to send email from your site, i.e. "tell a friend about this page" etc then the lack of a reverse DNS record will set off a lot of spam filters.

Simon.

[bhartzer]

It's definitely not "cloaking of some kind". Cloaking typically implies that you are actually feeding one page to the search engine robot and another to the user. I'm assuming that humans can get to the site (you don't mention whether they can or not)?

[GoogleGuy]

Reverse DNS not working won't cause problems for Googlebot--if it did, then we couldn't crawl lots of the web, because many people don't configure this, or do it incorrectly.

We only need to be able to map hostname->IP address.

Hope that helps,
GoogleGuy

[Kamin]

Thanks for the information. Im a bit confused now. The site is basically an index page and a shopping cart behind it. There is no hidden text or spam of that nature on any part of the site yet google and other search engines wont visit it. It's driving me up the wall crazy.

bhartzer yes when the URL is typed the site is served up. I wish I knew why google wont visit the site. Maybe there is something about the site I am missing that's causing it to be cursed.

Thanks

[mcavic]

Do you have a few inbound links?

If you'd like to mail me the url, I'll take a look at the site.