google and favicon

strange google behavior

[dupres01]

why would i get something like this:

74.125.181.19 - - [11/Aug/2012:09:37:09 -0600] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 200 766 "-" "-"
74.125.18.147 - - [11/Aug/2012:09:37:11 -0600] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 200 766 "-" "-"
74.125.44.85 - - [11/Aug/2012:09:37:17 -0600] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 200 766 "-" "-"
74.125.19.229 - - [11/Aug/2012:09:37:18 -0600] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 200 766 "-" "-"

supposedly from google, each request from a slightly different ip, each a few seconds apart, with no UA, and no other google requests within many minutes?

[wilderness]

Who knows the logic of google.

FWIW, unless you utilize the GWT or Adsense, you may virtually deny all the g ranges with the exception of the 66.249.64-95 and it would not harm your sites in the least.

There are some mobile devices that are using the many Google tool ranges as well, that you'd be denying as well.

[keyplyr]

There are some mobile devices that are using the many Google tool ranges as well, that you'd be denying as well.

Not quite IMO. App developers may use Google IPs when working on their apps, but once they're completed, released to the public & installed on a mobile device, the hits to your server will come from the mobile user's ISP.

[lucy24]

Do you use GWT? That's one of the places you'll see your favicon. By convention the faviconbot is sent out with no clothes on. I have to say this is pretty dimwitted on google's part, because they have to know that blocking visitors without a UA is one of the first things people do when they start putting up barriers around their site. On mine I've got a FilesMatch exception for the favicon to help flag humans who got locked out by mistake; the faviconbot is an unplanned beneficiary.

[dupres01]

No I don't use GWT (at least not that I am aware of).

[dstiles]

Trying to load favicon from a site's root is unreliable anyway. One of the faults of browsers such as FF.

Without looking in a page header it's not possible to be sure. I generate a LOT of rejections on my server to FF and similar, since my favicons are not in the root; a left-over from favicon scrapers prevalent a few years ago and still, in some cases, an annoyance.

As to 74.125.0.0/16 - I block the whole boiling!

[thetrasher]

74.125.18.21 - - [**/Mar/2012:**:**:** +0200] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "-"

GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Host: www.example.com
X-Forwarded-For: 213.209.119.***

213.209.119.*** didn't visit any page.

---

Maybe there's a connection to Google's Web Preview?

74.125.17.224 - - [31/Jul/2012:13:13:51 +0200] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 403 - "http://www.google.com/search" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/536.8 (KHTML, like Gecko; Google Web Preview) Chrome/19.0.1084.36 Safari/536.8"
74.125.18.163 - - [31/Jul/2012:13:16:27 +0200] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "-"
74.125.18.160 - - [31/Jul/2012:14:15:40 +0200] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "-"

GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Host: www.example.com
Referer: [google.com...]
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/536.8 (KHTML, like Gecko; Google Web Preview) Chrome/19.0.1084.36 Safari/536.8
X-Forwarded-For: 79.204.***.***

GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Host: example.com
X-Forwarded-For: 79.204.***.***

GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Host: www.example.com
X-Forwarded-For: 79.204.***.***