Member Avatar for clarinetalex

I found in my referrer log...:

I found an odd url in my referrers list. Upon googling the term “, I found nothing. And when I tried to go to nothing came up. I googled and found other domains that google had been snooping with. I wonder what gtools are? If you have any ideas, please tell me! I have a feeling its a tool that they use to review google news submissions. I recently submitted my site for approval by google news, but they already sent me a refusal letter. Here is the exact URL…

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found a referrer entry pointing at an internal-looking host and suggested it’s probably something used inside the company. Both observations are reasonable. The practical steps are to treat that referrer as either (a) a legitimate internal Google request that happened to leak a Referer header, or (b) a spoofed Referer/referrer‑spam entry — and then test which is true.

First, verify the origin using your server logs (IP + User‑Agent). Do a reverse DNS and a whois lookup on the IP seen in your logs; a genuine Google crawler will usually reverse-resolve to a google.com/googlebot.com hostname and belong to Google’s ASN. Example checks (replace IP_FROM_LOG with the IP from your logs):

# Replace IP_FROM_LOG with the IP shown in your server logs
dig -x IP_FROM_LOG +short
host IP_FROM_LOG
whois IP_FROM_LOG

Google documents the correct way to verify Google crawler traffic; follow that guidance rather than trusting only the Referer string (Verifying Googlebot). If the reverse lookup does not point to Google or the WHOIS shows a different owner, treat the Referer as spoofed. For background on this kind of noise in analytics/logs, see the discussion of referrer spam (Referrer spam — Wikipedia).

If the entry is spoofed, filter it out in your analytics or log-processing rules (filter by hostname or referrer patterns) and ignore it for indexing/news-approval conclusions. If the IP and reverse DNS do match Google, it’s likely an internal tool or employee-facing host sending a Referer and not an indicator of special Google attention to your news submission.

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Member Avatar for MIGSoft

I think it is probably something used inside the company.

Member Avatar for clarinetalex

I think it is probably something used inside the company.

I know, but that is what makes it even more mysterious. :?: :cool: :?:

Member Avatar for MIGSoft

It would be cool if this domain was reserved for the release of some future product named 'gtools'. However, I strongly doubt that that is the case.

Member Avatar for clarinetalex

Well, is well known as internal Google stuff so they'd have the domain gtools.com if that were the case. gtools.com is registered to someone using a domain regististration cloaking service.

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