Hi I received the following email from Google this morning, in relation to a Wordpress site:
Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 7 errors while attempting to connect to your site. Your site’s overall connection failure rate is 50.0%.
You can see more details about these errors in Webmaster Tools.
Recommended action
Verify that the web service software for your site is installed and running properly.
Verify that your firewall or server are not blocking googlebot's access to your site.
Verify that all scripts that run on your site have proper permissions to run.
Verify that your site has proper permissions to access the pages of your site.
Using Webmaster Tools, find a day with a high error rate and examine the logs for your web server for that day. Look for errors in the logs for that day and fix the causes of those errors.
Your site may be overloaded. Talk with your hosting provider about either reconfiguring your web server or allocating more resources to your web server.
If your site redirects to another hostname, another possible explanation is that a URL on your site is redirecting to a hostname that has one or more of the problems listed above.
After you think you’ve fixed the problem, use Fetch as Google to verify that Googlebot can properly access your site.
When I looked into it on Webmaster Tools it said
Google couldn’t access your site because of a server connectivity issue.
The site is up and running ok.
I’ve checked robots.txt and that seems fine.
I’ve chatted with my host (Fasthosts) about possible server connectivity issues or misconfiguration and the response was
I have heard of some instances of similar messages in the past, I believe it’s usually caused by the google bot wanting to query the server too many times in a short period of time. Changing the crawl rate will usually stop these messages from happening.
I can see why this would make the error messages less frequent! But I’m not sure it solves the problem.
My crawl rate is set to
Let Google optimize for my site (recommended)
I’d rather not post my site’s url publicly but will send it in a PM if necessary.
Can anyone suggest what’s causing this message to appear? And whether it’s harming my SEO?
Thanks