How to fix and issue with robot.txt ?
-
I am receiving the following error message through webmaster tools
http://www.sourcemarketingdirect.com/: Googlebot can't access your site
Oct 26, 2012
Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 35 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site's overall robots.txt error rate is 100.0%.The site has dropped out of Google search.
-
Hi Stacey
What plugins do you have running - any caching plugins such the W3 Total Cache plugin?
Are you able to access your servers error logs to see if you can see anything there?
-
Thanks for your answer.
I have received this message from Google
**http://www.sourcemarketingdirect.com/ **using the Meta tag method (less than a minute ago). Your site's home page returns a status of 500 (Internal server error) instead of 200 (OK)
It looks like the permalink structure has changed but I'm not sure how.
-
I've seen several people ask this very same question over the last week in different forums. I am wondering if the major outages with hurricane Sandy have affected several hosts or DNS's.
Your robots.txt looks fine to me.
I'm guessing that you will completely recover once Google has a chance to fully crawl the site again.
-
just a quick check you have got wordpress visible to search engines set in the admin area? if not it will be set to disallow googlebot to crawl it.
it is in admin - options - privacy and select appropriate box - default is no index, no follow.
-
Thanks Matt.
There is no robots.txt as far as I can see. Is there a plugin I can use for wordpress?
The site was down for 2 days last month while hte original host transfered the site over to me.
Right now a site search says their are 13 pages indexed.
Just concerned that this site has always ranked number 1 for a company name search and now they are not on the first 10 pages in Google.
-
have you made sure your robots.txt is loading in your browser by adding robots.txt after your domain same as a normal page and can you see contents? has your site been down in this period? have you changed the contents of the file just before this issue? are you sure googlebot hasnt come back since that date - whats your analytics say? do an index site: search for your domain to see if it is in google.
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
-
Drupal Domain Access SEO Issues
I'm working with a new developer to redesign several Drupal sites and have 3-4 sites with similar designs and modules. The developer is keen on using Drupal Domain Access to make maintenance and sharing user information easier. Each site currently has a unique domain and content (although the sites are in related niches). Are there issues from an SEO perspective with the Drupal Domain Access Module? With only one instance of Drupal on the backend will Google somehow not view these as independent sites? Thanks for any info!
Web Design | | talltrees0 -
Bing Indexation and handling of X-ROBOTS tag or AngularJS
Hi MozCommunity, I have been tearing my hair out trying to figure out why BING wont index a test site we're running. We're in the midst of upgrading one of our sites from archaic technology and infrastructure to a fully responsive version.
Web Design | | AU-SEO
This new site is a fully AngularJS driven site. There's currently over 2 million pages and as we're developing the new site in the backend, we would like to test out the tech with Google and Bing. We're looking at a pre-render option to be able to create static HTML snapshots of the pages that we care about the most and will be available on the sitemap.xml.gz However, with 3 completely static HTML control pages established, where we had a page with no robots metatag on the page, one with the robots NOINDEX metatag in the head section and one with a dynamic header (X-ROBOTS meta) on a third page with the NOINDEX directive as well. We expected the one without the meta tag to at least get indexed along with the homepage of the test site. In addition to those 3 control pages, we had 3 pages where we had an internal search results page with the dynamic NOINDEX header. A listing page with no such header and the homepage with no such header. With Google, the correct indexation occured with only 3 pages being indexed, being the homepage, the listing page and the control page without the metatag. However, with BING, there's nothing. No page indexed at all. Not even the flat static HTML page without any robots directive. I have a valid sitemap.xml file and a robots.txt directive open to all engines across all pages yet, nothing. I used the fetch as Bingbot tool, the SEO analyzer Tool and the Preview Page Tool within Bing Webmaster Tools, and they all show a preview of the requested pages. Including the ones with the dynamic header asking it not to index those pages. I'm stumped. I don't know what to do next to understand if BING can accurately process dynamic headers or AngularJS content. Upon checking BWT, there's definitely been crawl activity since it marked against the XML sitemap as successful and put a 4 next to the number of crawled pages. Still no result when running a site: command though. Google responded perfectly and understood exactly which pages to index and crawl. Anyone else used dynamic headers or AngularJS that might be able to chime in perhaps with running similar tests? Thanks in advance for your assistance....0 -
Robots.txt being blocked
I think there is an issue with this website I'm working on here is the URL: http://brownieairservice.com/ In Google Webmaster tools I am seeing this in the Robots.txt tester: User-agent: *
Web Design | | SOM24
Crawl-delay: 1
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-admin/ Also when I look at "blocked resources" in the webmaster tools this is showing to be blocked: http://brownieairservice.com/wp-content/plugins/contact-form-7/includes/js/jquery.form.min.js?ver=3.51.0-2014.06.20It looks like the form plug in is giving the issues but I don't understand this. There are no site errors or URL errors so I don't understand what this crawl delay means or how to fix it. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you0 -
How to command Robots.txt to this:
Hi, So for some reason I have this unexplained issues in webmaster tools. Check them out: http://prntscr.com/7n1nj8 See that iSeeCars.com? How to remove it? Is it just disallow: iseecars.com? Or should I disallow the search to be crawled? Regards,
Web Design | | Kokolo0 -
Mobile Friendly Issue
2 days ago I saw my site listed with the 'mobile friendly' text in the Mobile searches. Today it has vanished. I have checked my site using the Google tool and it shows my site as Mobile Friendly. Has anyone had a similar experience?
Web Design | | dynamyt1000 -
Breadcrumbs show for some section and dont come for some. What could be the issue
Hello, We have implemented breadcrumbs - which comes up nicely for Blog and Forum in Google Search However, when we look at our 2 other section - New Car Product and Latest News - it does not comes up, is there any issue which can foresee Sample URL of New Car - http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_newcar&view=product&Itemid=2&id=8&vid=188 Sample URL of News - http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=detail&n_id=474&Itemid=10 Its been over 1 month - since breadcrumbs been introduced in both New Car and News. is there any issue like in them as why is is not showing in search. Any recommendations Many Thanks !!
Web Design | | Modi0 -
Google search issue with exact domain
We had a site from Feb-2011 to Nov-2011 at the domain amcoexterminating.com. The site was pure HTML/CSS and the daily unique visitors steadily increased over that time. So all was fine. We then moved the site to a CMS (Joomla) on Dec. 6th. From that day forward, the daily visitors went into the tank. Before the move, if you typed "amcoexterminating.com" or "amco exterminating" into Google search, the site would be the first result (as you'd expect since those are the words that make up the actua domain). But we tried this yesterday and the site did not come up at all. NOT GOOD. It would work in Yahoo or Bing, but not in Google. So obviously, the problem with Google search directly affected the daily visitors. We just checked Webmaster tools yesterday (yes, this should have been done sooner, lesson learned) and it said "Site has severe health issues - Important page blocked by robots.txt". It listed the "important" page URL and it was just a link to an image. Regardless, I wiped out the Joomla created robots.txt file and added a new one and made it just say... User-agent: *Allow: / About 14 hours later, after the new robots.txt file was recognized by Google, the "severe health" message went away. However if I search in Google for "amcoexterminating.com", it still doesn't show up and the client is concerned (as they should be). Do you think the search engines just need more time to refresh? If so, once it refreshes, should the site show up first again right away? Or is it possible the robots.txt file had nothing to do with the issue? If so, what other things could I check into that might cause Google search to not find a site even if you search for exact domain name? Please share any and all things I should look into as I need to get this site showing in Google search again (as it was before moving to the CMS). Thanks!
Web Design | | MarathonMS0 -
Has Anyone Had Issues With ASP.NET 4.0 URL Routing?
I'm seeing some odd results in my SEOMOZ results with a new site I just released that is using the ASP.NET 4.0 URL routing. I am seeing thousands(!) of duplicate results, for instance, because the crawl has uncovered something like this: http://www.mysite.com/
Web Design | | TroyCarlson
http://www.mysite.com/default.aspx (so far, so good, though I wish it wouldn't show both)
http://www.mysite.com/default.aspx/about/ (what the heck -?)
http://www.mysite.com/default.aspx/about/about/ (WTF!?)
http://www.mysite.com/default.aspx/about/about/products/ (and on and on ad infinitum) I'm also seeing problems pop up in my sitemap because extensionless urls have an odd "eurl.axd/abunchofnumbersgohere" appended to the end of every address which is breaking links. sigh Buyer beware. I've found articles that discuss the "eurl.axd" issue here and there (this one seems very good), but nothing about the weird crawl issue I outlined above. Any advice?0