Wordpress error
-
On our Google Webmaster Tools I'm getting a Severe Health Warning regarding our Robot.txt file reading:
User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 20User-agent: 008
Disallow: /I'm wondering how I can fix this and stop it happening again.
The site was hacked about 4 months ago but I thought we'd managed to clear things up.
Colin
-
This will be my first post on SEOmoz so bear with me
The way I understand it is that robots read the robots.txt file from top to bottom, and once they find a rule that applies to them they stop reading and begin crawling. So basically the robots.txt written as:
User-agent:*
Disallow:
Crawl-delay: 20
User-agent: 008
Disallow: /
would not have the desired result as user-agent 008 would first read the top guideline:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Crawl-delay: 20
and then begin crawling your site, as it is first being told that All user-agents are disallowed to crawl no pages or directories.
The corrected way to write this would be:
User-agent: 008
Disallow: /
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Crawl-delay: 20
-
Hi Peter,
I've tested the robot.txt file in Webmaster Tools and it now seems to be working as it should and it seems Google is seeing the same file as I have on the server.
I'm afraid this side of things isn't' my area of expertise so it's been a bit of a minefield.
I've taken a subscription with sucuri.net and taken various other steps that hopefully will hel;p with security. But who knows?
Thanks,
Colin
-
Google is seeing the same Robots.txt content (in GWT) that you show in the physical file, right? I just want to make sure that, when the site was hacked, no changes were made that are showing different versions of files to Google. It sounds like that's not the case here, but it definitely can happen.
-
Blog isn't' showing now and my hosts say that the index.php file is missing from the directory but I can see it.
Strange.
Have contacted them again to see what the problem can be.
Bit of a wasted Saturday!
-
Thanks Keith. Just contacting out hosts.
Nightmare!
-
Looks like a 403 permissions problem, that's a server side error... Make sure you have the correct permissions set on the blog folder in IIS Personally I always host on Linux...
-
Mind you the whole blog is now showing an error message and cant' be viewed so looks like an afternoon of trial and error!
-
Thanks very much Keith. I've just edited the file as suggested.
I see the error but as I am the web guy I cant' figure out how to get rid of it.
I think it might be a plugin that's causing it so I'm going to disable the and re-able them one as a time.
I've just PM'd you by the way.
Thanks for your help Keith.
Colin
-
Use this:
**User-agent: * Disallow: /blog/wp-admin/ Disallow: /blog/wp-includes/ Sitemap: http://nile-cruises-4u.co.uk/sitemap.xml**
Any FYI, you have the following error on your blog:
Warning: is_readable() [function.is-readable]: open_basedir restriction in effect. File(D:\home\nile-cruises-4u.co.uk\wwwroot\blog/wp-content/plugins/D:\home\nile-cruises-4u.co.uk\wwwroot\blog\wp-content\plugins\websitedefender-wordpress-security/languages/WSDWP_SECURITY-en_US.mo) is not within the allowed path(s): (D:\home\nile-cruises-4u.co.uk\wwwroot) in D:\home\nile-cruises-4u.co.uk\wwwroot\blog\wp-includes\l10n.php on line **339 **
Get your web guy to look at that, it appears at the top of every blog page for me...
Hope that helps,
Keith
-
Thanks Keith.
Only part of our site is WP based. Would that be a problem using the example you kindly suggested?
-
I gave you an example of a basic robots.txt file that I use on one of my Wordpress sites above, I would suggest using that for now.
I would not bother messing around with crawl delay in robots.txt as Peter said above there are better ways to achieve this... Plus I doubt you need it any way.
Google caches the robots.txt info for about 24hrs normally in my experience... So it's possible the old cached version is still being used by Google.
-
Hi Guys,
Thanks so much for your help. As you say Troy, that's defintely not what I want.
I assumed when we were hacked (twice in 8 months) that it might have been a competitor as we are in a very competitive niche. Might be very wrong there but we have certainly lost our top ranking on Google.co.uk for our main key phrases and our now at about position 7 for the same key phrases after about 3 years at number 1.
So when I saw on Google Webmaster Tools yesterday that we had a severe health warning and that the Googlebot was being prevented crawling our site I thought it might be the aftereffects of the hack.
Today even though I changed the robot.txt file yesterday GWT is showing 1000 pages with errors, 285 Access Denied and 719 Not Found and this message: Googlebot is blocked from http://nile-cruises-4u.co.uk/
I've just tested the robot.txt via GWT and now get this message:
AllowedDetected as a directory; specific files may have different restrictionsSo maybe the pages will be able to access by Googlebot shortly and the Access Denied message will disappear.I've chaged the robot.txt file to
User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 20But should I change it to a better version? Sorry guys, I'm an online travel agent and not great on coding and really techie stuff. Although I'm learning pretty quickly about the bad stuff!I seem to have a few problems getting this sorted and wonder if this is a part of why our page position is dropping? -
I would simplify your robots.txt to read something like:
**User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ Sitemap: http://www.your-domain.com/sitemap.xml**
-
That's odd: "008" appears to be the user agent for "80legs", a custom crawler platform. I'm seeing it in other Robots.txt files.
-
I'm not 100% sure what he's seeing, but when I plug his robots.txt into the robots analysis tool, I get this back:
Googlebot blocked by line 5: Disallow: /
Detected as a directory; specific files may have different restrictions
However, when I gave the top "**User-agent: ***" the "Disallow: " it seemed to fix the problem. Like, it didn't understand that the **Disallow: / **was meant only for the 008 user-agent?
-
Not honestly sure what User-agent "008" is, but that seems harmless. Why the crawl delay? There are better ways to handle that than Robots.txt, if a crawler is giving you trouble.
Was there a specific message/error in GWT?
-
I think, if you have a robots.txt reading what you show above:
User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 20
User-agent: 008 Disallow: /
That just basically says, "Don't crawl my site at all" (The "Disallow: /" means, I'm not allowing anything to be crawled by any search engine that pays attention to robots.txt at all)
So...I'm guessing that's not what you want?
(Bah..ignore. "User-agent". I'm a fool)
Actually, this seems to have solved your issue...make sure you explicitly tell all other User-agents that they are allowed:
User-agent: * Disallow: Crawl-delay: 20
User-agent: 008 Disallow: /
The extra "Disallow:" under User-agent: * says "I'm not going to disallow anything to most user-agents." Then the Disallow under user-agent 008 seems to only apply to them.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Error reports showing pages that don't exist on website
I have a website that is showing lots of errors (pages that cannot be found) in google webmaster tools. I went through the errors and re-directed the pages I could. There are a bunch of remaining pages that are not really pages this is why they are showing errors. What's strange is some of the URL's are showing feeds which these were never created. I went into Google webmaster tools and looked at the remove URL tool. I am using this but I am confused if I need to be selecting "remove page from search results and cache" option or should I be selecting this other option "remove directory" I am confused on the directory. I don't want to accidentally delete core pages of the site from the search engines. Can anybody shed some light on this or recommend which I should be selecting? Thank you Wendy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SOM240 -
What do do when sidebar is causing "Too Many On-Page Links" error
I have been going through all the errors, warnings from my weekly SEO Moz scans. One thing I'm see a bit of is "Too Many On-Page Links". I've only seen a few, but as in the case of this one: http://blog.mexpro.com/5-kid-friendly-cancun-mexico-resorts there is only 2 links on the page (the image and the read more). So I think the sidebar links are causing the error. I feel my tags are important to help readers find information they may be looking for. Is there a better method to present tags than the wordpress tag cloud? Should I exclude the tags, with the risk of making things more difficult for my users? Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
WordPress redesign: using posts as pages?
Starting a redesign for an attorney who is currently using WordPress with an old framework that is no longer being supported, so I'm going to install a new WP and start from scratch. The site consists of about 30 static pages (practice areas, attorney profiles, etc.) and they write about 5 blog posts per month. I've always differentiated between posts and pages for WP sites I've done in the past, but this time around I thought it might be more clean (less files, and easier for their webmaster to make routine edits) if I just brought over the static pages as posts. However, the recent webinar on the Yoast SEO plugin mentioned using the month/day in the permalink structure for posts to avoid duplicate content issues. That would go against how I was thinking of setting it up, because I would have just generated the URL off the page title and make a separate category for "pages". Just wondering if anyone's used posts as pages before. While this seems like it would make things easier for the webmaster, I'm not sure it maximizes potential for SEO. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | c2g0 -
Killing 404 errors on our site in Google's index
Having moved a site across to Magento, obviously re-directs were a large part of that, ensuring all the old products and categories linked up correctly with the new site structure. However, we came up against an issue where we needed to add, delete, then re-add products. This, coupled with a misunderstanding of the csv upload processing, meant that although the old urls redirected, some of the new Magento urls changed and then didn't redirect: For Example: mysite/product would get deleted re-added and become: mysite/product-1324 We now know what we did wrong to ensure it doesn't continue to happen if we weret o delete and re-add a product, but Google contains all these old URLs in its index which has caused people to search for products on Google, click through, then land on the 404 page - far from ideal. We kind of assumed, with continual updating of sitemaps and time, that Google would realise and update the URL accordingly. But this hasn't happened - we are still getting plenty of 404 errors on certain product searches (These aren't appearing in SEOmoz, there are no links to the old URL on the site, only Google, as the index contains the old URL). Aside from going through and finding the products affected (no easy task), and setting up redirects for each one, is there any way we can tell Google 'These URLs are no longer a thing, forget them and move on, let's make a fresh start and Happy New Year'?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
Recovering from Programmers Error
Hey Everybody! Last year one of my bigger sites hit a snaffu. I was getting about 300k + hits a day from google, and then, when a developper released an update with a robots.txt file that basically blocked google from the entire site. We didn't notice the bug until a few days later, but by then, it was already too late. My google traffic dropped to 30k a day and I've been having the hardest time coming back ever since. As a matter of fact, hundreds of sites that were aggregating my content started outranking me for my own terms. For over a year, I've been working on building what I lost back and everything seemed to be coming together. I was back at 100k+ hits a day Until today... My developpers repeated the exact same error as last year. They blocked google from crawling my site for over 5 days and now I'm down to 10k se hits a day. My question : Has anyone encountered this problem before and what did you do to come back?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CrakJason0 -
URL Error or Penguin Penalty?
I am currently having a major panic as our website www.uksoccershop.com has been largely dropped from Google. We have not made any changes recently and I am not sure why this is happening, but having heard all sorts of horror stories of penguin update, I am fearing the worst. If you google "uksoccershop" you will see that the homepage does not rank. We previously ranked in the top 3 for "football shirts" but now we don't, although on page 2, 3 and 4 you will see one of our category pages ranking (this didn't used to happen). Some rankings are intact, but many have disappeared completely and in some cases been replaced by other pages on our site. I should point out our existing rankings have been consistently there for 5-6 years until today. I logged into webmaster tools and thankfully there is no warning message from Google about spam, etc, but what we do have is 35,000 URL errors for pages which are accessible. An example of this is: | URL: | http://www.uksoccershop.com/categories/5_295_327.html | | Error details In Sitemaps Linked from Last crawled: 6/20/12First detected: 6/15/12Googlebot couldn't access the contents of this URL because the server had an internal error when trying to process the request. These errors tend to be with the server itself, not with the request. Is it possible this is the cause of the issue (we are not currently sure why the URL's are being blocked) and if so, how severe is it and how recoverable?If that is unlikely to cause the issue, what would you recommend our next move is?All help is REALLY REALLY appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840 -
Wordpress site architecture conflicts and how to go about fixing them
I am attempting to figure something out with a site I'm trying to fix. So the problem is that I've got two categories that are basically related keywords. I set this up when I first started doing this work and didn't know what I was doing. So that site at one time was ranking on the first page for a specific term (example: 'project manager salary' and posted in the category 'project manager salary'. But they we added 'project manager salary in Vermont' and all other 50 posts for all states in a different category called, 'project manager salaries and benefits'. So my question is this: Would this cause some kind of keyword rank cannibalization? How do I fix this properly? Thanks! Michael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtking.us_gmail.com0 -
Fixing Duplicate Content Errors
SEOMOZ Pro is showing some duplicate content errors and wondered the best way to fix them other than re-writing the content. Should I just remove the pages found or should I set up permanent re-directs through to the home page in case there is any link value or visitors on these duplicate pages? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benners0