Ok, I am admitting this in hopes no one else does something so stupid...
I purchased another company last year and have been devoting much attention to that. I get emails from google one a month and recently noticed way less first page rankings for my old company. I really haven't investigated and attributed the lower sales for the old company (which has always done very well in google organic serps), to a bad economy.
If I was using my head, I would have known we should be up, because I built this company in 2008, with explosive growth during an economic recession.
I should have taken a look at google search console and/or semrush
I just discovered this Friday.
It's been a year that google has dropped most all pages
Using and AI assistant I began troubleshooting - lots and lots of troubleshooting.
At some point, I was given a popular prefix for some of goodles bots - 216.239
So just to check, I checked my list of blocked IP's and I blocked the whole damn range - 216.239.0.0 - 216.239.255.255
See we serve product ads and over the years I have blocking their shopping bot because it loads up tons of orders sometimes 40-50 of them - incomlete ordeers back to back.
Sometimes during the day.
Well it would just use a different it and over time I guess I saw the 216.239 over and over and just blocked the range.
I SHOWED THEM!!!!
Little did I know the the shopping bot is the same as the SEO bots - or at least use the same IP addresses.
So, the lesson is never block IP's with the prefix
66.249.*
64.233.*
72.14.*
74.125.*
209.85.*
216.239.*
108.177.*
or it might cost you $250.000.00
Thanks for reading,
David
the great $250k mistake
Posted - 11/09/2025 : 16:57:19
