Google Site Verification Doesn't Take Rejection Well

[incrediBILL]

Something triggered Google Site Verification to start attempting to re-validate one of my previously validated sites the other day and it got a 403 forbidden as I didn't know I needed to whitelist this beyond it's initial access.

Everyday since the first attempt got a 403 it's been hammering from different IPs daily like this:

74.125.16.81,United States,"Google-Site-Verification/1.0",/googlezzzzzzzz.html
72.14.202.95,United States,"Google-Site-Verification/1.0",/googlezzzzzzzz.html
74.125.184.81,United States,"Google-Site-Verification/1.0",/googlezzzzzzzz.html
74.125.181.19,United States,"Google-Site-Verification/1.0",/googlezzzzzzzz.html
74.125.17.212,United States,"Google-Site-Verification/1.0",/googlezzzzzzzz.html
74.125.18.20,United States,"Google-Site-Verification/1.0",/googlezzzzzzzz.html
64.233.162.84,United States,"Google-Site-Verification/1.0",/googlezzzzzzzz.html
74.125.126.95,United States,"Google-Site-Verification/1.0",/googlezzzzzzzz.html
74.125.18.151,United States,"Google-Site-Verification/1.0",/googlezzzzzzzz.html
74.125.18.153,United States,"Google-Site-Verification/1.0",/googlezzzzzzzz.html
74.125.189.19,United States,"Google-Site-Verification/1.0",/googlezzzzzzzz.html
74.125.179.22,United States,"Google-Site-Verification/1.0",/googlezzzzzzzz.html
74.125.70.84,United States,"Google-Site-Verification/1.0",/googlezzzzzzzz.html
173.194.99.21,United States,"Google-Site-Verification/1.0",/googlezzzzzzzz.html
74.125.126.99,United States,"Google-Site-Verification/1.0",/googlezzzzzzzz.html
74.125.19.32,United States,"Google-Site-Verification/1.0",/googlezzzzzzzz.html

Day after day this pattern repeats for a couple of weeks now from a lot of IPs.

Guess I'll whitelist it and let it complete so the madness will stop.

[g1smd]

Google does automatically re-verify on an occasional basis.

[lucy24]

... as I learned after rashly deleting the file, thinking they wouldn't need it any more. Oops. Quick detour to raw logs suggests it's pretty random, anywhere from 1-4 times a month. Don't know, of course, if this is a standard interval or if it's proportional to site size.

Bing also rechecks regularly-- more often than google in fact, pretty consistently once a week. They use the plainclothes robot, so if you've got it blocked you have to make an exception.

Yandex otoh seems to have been satisfied with a one-time check.

[keyplyr]

Bing also rechecks regularly-- more often than google in fact, pretty consistently once a week...

Bing crawls one of my sites each and every day, the entire site, requesting 20% more than once. It asks for the verification file each day as well. It also makes the very same 404 errors each day. This has been going on for 2 years. Their support staff denies it, even when I zip-up a days logs and send it to them.

[dstiles]

I had a whole swathe of G verifies using a variety of IPs. All got rejected. No idea why they suddenly hit in such a flurry; can't recall such activity before.

The IPs are not properly registered as bot-ish so they are rejected anyway (I block nearly all G IPs except bots nowadays).

The attempts were as often to bare domains as to proper www subdomains, which is stupid since I redirect all bare domains.

Frankly I no longer care whether they verify or not.