What is this? yx-out-f136.google.com

[jmpreston]

This host has been rising in my site stats and visiting lots of pages. I thought Google's search engine used the googlebot.com domain. It resolves to Google, Inc. in whois but reverse IP didn't seem to work, at least for this newbie.

I'm blocking amazonaws.com in .htaccess due to what appear to be some kind of scams. Does Google have a cloud service that is being used by scammers and the others? I can't seem to find out much about this topic with searches.

- jim

[g1smd]

The yx and 136 parts would point me to assume that 74.125.45.136 is the originating IP, emanating from one of Google's newer datacentres, first online less than a year ago.

You can get back in with gfe-yx.google.com to make searches.

[jmpreston]

Interesting, but I wonder why it is getting so many page views that it is the top ranked host in my site stats. Would Google use this for indexing sites or are non-Google apps running on this server like with amazonaws.com? The IP appears to be a valid Google site.

It would be nice if the Google techies would consider Webmasters information needs when they invent domain name extensions.

- jim

[g1smd]

The out and in and gfe nomenclature is documented in a few places. There's also a few lists of valid values for those names, as well as lists of yet other names out there.

[jmpreston]

Thanks, but I don't have a clue what you are talking about :-) I did searches for this full domain but couldn't find much info.

So apparently this extension or add-on actually means something to some techies. I'm not sure knowing the tech details helps me with my concern about a Google server being used for some scamming, scraping, or whatever. I have to make a decision; block this site or not.

- jim

[jdMorgan]

No need to be shy: [webmasterworld.com...]

The question is, do these requests look like users or 'bots in your log files? What are the user-agent strings? What are the referrers? Do they fetch images, css, and external javascript files, or just pages or just images? Do they send the various "Accept" request headers consistent with the user-agent strings? Any proxy-related request headers with these requests -- "Via" or "X-Forwarded-For," for example?

Jim

[jmpreston]

OK, well over my head. I'll need to sort that out. I have access to my log files but have never dug into them. I'm using AW Stats which doesn't seem to be up to serious digging for data.

- jim

[jmpreston]

After spending time in my site logs I suspect that this address is part of the Feedburner.com conversion to Google. I recently did as Google instructed and moved my Feedburner account to Google.