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I received this message from Google Webmaster Tools:

Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 2 errors while attempting to retrieve DNS information for your site. The overall error rate for DNS queries for your site is 40.0%. You can see more details about these errors in Webmaster Tools. Recommended action

I've contacted HostPapa and they deny that there is any issue with the site / server. Support from them in terms of what I can do to actually resolve this issue is non-existent.

The site is currently online. I don't know much about DNS, so any advice about what I can do to resolve this problem would be much appreciated.

Basically, the message from Google says that it is my webhost's fault, the message from my webhost (HostPapa) is... "Just tell Google to crawl your site as there are no errors."

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I got a similar message on December 11th

Googlebot can't access your site

Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 3 errors while attempting to retrieve DNS information for your site. The overall error rate for DNS queries for your site is 60.0%.

As soon as I got this email I went to my website which loaded fine. I cleared my DNS cache checked again, then a third time from a private browser.

It's most likely from some DNS server going down or some routing problem or maintenance that affected your website to resolve when Google bot tried to access it.

If you can access your website now things are fine and there's no need to worry about it. If you want to pry at your host, you could email Google Webmaster Tools ask for details on the time and date they couldn't access the site and send that to your host for more information.

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    +1. Additionally, in Webmaster Tools if you go to the Fetch as Google feature and you can fetch your robots.txt file just fine, chances are it was something temporary on the route and no need to panic.
    – methode
    Dec 15, 2012 at 16:28
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This error as nothing to do with robots.txt, you will receive a different message that your site is blocking sites indexing them.

DNS queries works by querying your domain for the IP address of your server, DNS records are stored at your name server. If your % is very slow then you should consider moving your domain to better name server.

Companies pay big bucks for premium uptime and responses of their DNS records as if they are not accessible nor is the site accessible via the domain name.

Most people get cheap hosting and change the name servers from their domain registrar to their hosting because its easier than changing the A records using the name servers that are operated by the registar.

In this day and age most registrars have reliable and responsive name servers, and changing the name servers to that of your hosting account is generally a bad idea unless they are have reputable name servers, I.E Rackspace, Amazon, Lime etc etc.

Conclusion: Use a different DNS server to store your domain records, if you are currently using your name servers that are hosted with your hosting company and you that domain that you own offers its own name servers with configurable DNS settings then use them to control and dish out the DNS queries.

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