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
-
What should I do after a failed request for validation (error with noindex, nofollow) in new Google Search Console?
Hi guys, We have the following situation: After an error message in new google search console for a large amount of pages with noindex, nofollow tag, a validation is requested before the problem is fixed. (it's incredibly stupid decision taken before asking the SEO team for advice) Google starts the validation, crawls 9 URLs and changes the status to "Failed". All other URLs are still in "pending" status. The problem has been fixed for more than 10 days, but apparently Google doesn't crawl the pages and none of the URLs is back in the index. We tried pinging several pages and html sitemaps, but there is no result. Do you think we should request for re-validation or wait more time? It there something more we could do to speed up the process?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ParisChildress0 -
Wordpress Blog in 2 languages. How to SEO or structure it?
Hi Moz community, I have got a wordpress blog currently in the spanish language. I want to create the same blog content but in english version. (manually translate it to english instead of using translation service such as Google Translate). How should i structure the blog for SEO? How will it work? Any structure markups i should know about? Any examples? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WayneRooney0 -
WordPress and Rich Snippets plugin creating 501 error
Good Morning MOZguru's, Right, so I've been trying to install the Google schema.org rich snippet plugin through Wordpress for a website, and after I activate it, the website does not load ( appears a blank page) or loads very very slooooowww. Also through the MOZBar, Http status section, after the plug in it's activated it shows a 501 error. I had this issues with another website I was working on, hosted by Godaddy, and fixed it by installing plugins through the control panel on go daddy and not through WordPress. However this website is not hosted on the same platform. Does anyone know what should I do in order for the plugin to work and not affect the website? Many thanks, Moncia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monicapopa0 -
How to migrate from an asp.net to wordpress without loosing domain authority?
I would like to migrate my current website, which is asp.net, to WordPress. However the current asp.net is sitting on hosting which is windows based and WordPress isn't very compatible. Do I need to migrate hosting to a Linux based hosting provider? But if I do can I still migrate the asp.net files from my current website so I can 301 redirect? Any help on this would be great. Regards, Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CoGri0 -
Wordpress Blogs and SEO
So far we have been creating separate blogs on wordpress.com for our sites, and writing there. Today I was told that there was better SEO hosting the blog on the actual domain. i.e. www.widgets.com/blog instead of widget.wordpress.com Is this true? Oddly I have had my WP beat my own URL on one account. So I am not sure if this is valid. Can someone tell me pros and cons of both? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | greenhornet770 -
Question regarding error url while checking in open-site explorer tool
Hello friends, My website home url & inner page url shows error while checking the open-site site explorer tool from SEOMoz, for a website** eg.www.abc.com website as**
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zco_seo
**"Oh Hey! It looks like that URL redirects to www.abc.com/error.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/default.aspx. Would you like to see data for that URL instead?"**May I know the reason, why this url showing this result while checking back link report from the tool?**May I know on what basis this tool is evaluating the website url as well?****May I know, Will this affect the Google SERPs for this website?**Thanks0 -
Why are our sites top landing pages URL's that no longer exist and retrun 404 errors?
Digging through analytics today an noticed that our sites top landing pages are for pages that were part of the old www.towelsrus.co.uk website taken down almost 12 months ago. All these pages had the 301 re-directs which were removed a few months back but still have not dropped out of Googles crawl error logs. I can't understand why this is happening but almost certainly the bounce rate on these pages (100%) mean we are loosing potential conversions. How can I identify what keywords and links people are using to land on these pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Robots.txt is blocking Wordpress Pages from Googlebot?
I have a robots.txt file on my server, which I did not develop, it was done by the web designer at the company before me. Then there is a word press plugin that generates a robots.txt file. How Do I unblock all the wordpress pages from googlebot?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ENSO0