Google even provided with a smarter and always up to date way to verify googlebot :
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. ... lebot.htmlTelling webmasters to use DNS to verify on a case-by-case basis seems like the best way to go. I think the recommended technique would be to do a reverse DNS lookup, verify that the name is in the googlebot.com domain, and then do a corresponding forward DNS->IP lookup using that googlebot.com name; eg:
> host 66.249.66.1
1.66.249.66.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer crawl-66-249-66-1.googlebot.com.
> host crawl-66-249-66-1.googlebot.com
crawl-66-249-66-1.googlebot.com has address 66.249.66.1
I don't think just doing a reverse DNS lookup is sufficient, because a spoofer could set up reverse DNS to point to crawl-a-b-c-d.googlebot.com.
Of course, this is still not fully safe for those willing to go for cloaking, since google could still verify your site with other hosts / ip, but at least, it does not requires you to keep your ip list up to date.
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