In researching something else I stumbled across this great article on Bogons, a problem most people don’t know exist. What’s a Bogon? According to the article:

There are billions of potential IP addresses in the world, including a lot of IP addresses that are not being used. They are either being held in reserve for future needs, or are allocated for testing or other purposes. It’s a fair assumption that anything coming to you with an address you know is fake is probably up to no good.

Network administrators have discovered that if they block all of these known unused addresses from moving through their networks, they can block upwards of 60% of spam and hackers. This makes blocking known unused addresses a very easy way to make your network run better and make your users happy.

These unused IP addresses are collectively known as bogons.

So you have just moved your site onto a new webhost and within a week or two you see your pages disappearing off the search engines one by one. What happened? Your new webhost probably put you on a new IP address, and somewhere on the network your site is being blocked because of the IP address it’s on. To trace down and see if this is the issue you can check your IP and see if it was allocated within the last year. You can also run a series of tracerts and if the site is blocked at the same node repeatedly, then it’s probably a bogon block that hasn’t been updated. Then you can notify your host of what you found and hopefully they’ll be able to effectively deal with it. If not, you move hosts, hopefully to another IP that isn’t being filtered by bogon filters.

Technorati Tags: Search Engine Ranking, SEO, Bogon, Spider block

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 5:03 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.