I accidentally blocked Google with Robots.txt. What next?
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Last week I uploaded my site and forgot to remove the robots.txt file with this text:
User-agent: * Disallow: /
I dropped from page 11 on my main keywords to past page 50.
I caught it 2-3 days later and have now fixed it. I re-imported my site map with Webmaster Tools and I also did a Fetch as Google through Webmaster Tools. I tweeted out my URL to hopefully get Google to crawl it faster too.
Webmaster Tools no longer says that the site is experiencing outages, but when I look at my blocked URLs it still says 249 are blocked. That's actually gone up since I made the fix.
In the Google search results, it still no longer has my page title and the description still says "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more."
How will this affect me long-term? When will I recover my rankings? Is there anything else I can do?
Thanks for your input!
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Excellent. Good luck on your climb to page 1.
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RESULTS: So Google re-crawled my site at some point since I fetched it through Webmaster Tools. My page in the search results now has my title and meta description back and I bounced back to page 15. Page 15 isn't too abnormal, as before I accidentally blocked myself I had been bouncing around from page 11 to 18.
Thanks for our input and hopefully this will help someone in the future.
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Thanks for the input. Where do I fetch my URL within GWT? Any ideas on how quickly I'll regain my rankings? Will I have to make up some ground with my SEO work, or will Google just place me back where I was once they re-crawl my site?
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I agree with Sebastian's follow up suggestions. It's way quicker to de-index yourself than it is to get those rankings back. Even one the robots is "cleared" it can take time to get back to where you were.
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Hi,
Sorry to hear you're having issues, we've all accidently blocked off our site at one point or another I'm sure.
You've done pretty much everything you can do to get your site re-indexed. The only other thing I could suggest is to do a fetch URL within GWT, then take it a step further by submitting your URL and all linked pages.
If you haven't recovered within a week or so, then it may be an idea to do a reconsideration request.
Good luck!
You should recover to where you were previously within a week or so.
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