googlebot-verify

Synopsis

Verify that an IP address is from Google using Google's recommended DNS verification steps.

Motivation

You may wish to verify that a web crawler accessing your server is Googlebot (or another Google user-agent) and not spammers or other bots scraping your site while claiming to be Googlebot. Since you cannot rely on the User-Agent header which is easily spoofed, you need to use DNS look up to verify that the IP address belongs to Google.

This library implements Google's own verification steps outlined here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en

Installation

npm install googlebot-verify

Code Examples

Using a callback

  const verify = require('googlebot-verify');
  const ip = req.headers['x-forwarded-for'] || req.connection.remoteAddress;

  verify(ip, (error, isGoogle) => {
    if (isGoogle) {
      // do something with result...
    }
  });

Using a Promise

  verify(ip)
  .then( isGoogle => { /* handle result */ })
  .catch( e => { /* handle error */ });

Tests

npm test

License

MIT