Google insists robots.txt is blocking... but it isn't.
-
I recently launched a new website. During development, I'd enabled the option in WordPress to prevent search engines from indexing the site.
When the site went public (over 24 hours ago), I cleared that option. At that point, I added a specific robots.txt file that only disallowed a couple directories of files. You can view the robots.txt at http://photogeardeals.com/robots.txt
Google (via Webmaster tools) is insisting that my robots.txt file contains a "Disallow: /" on line 2 and that it's preventing Google from indexing the site and preventing me from submitting a sitemap. These errors are showing both in the sitemap section of Webmaster tools as well as the Blocked URLs section.
Bing's webmaster tools are able to read the site and sitemap just fine.
Any idea why Google insists I'm disallowing everything even after telling it to re-fetch?
-
Hi Aaron - You have a couple of solid answers here. Has your issue been resolved in GWT?
-
24 hours is a short time and probably google did not reindex or even looked at your new robot.txt
Webmaster tools is way slower than bing tools, so be patient.
As a rule of thumb, I wait at least a week with google before worrying (my 2 cents)
-
Hi Aaron,
I identify with your frustration, but want to lead my response with the caveat that I am not a developer so there may be people here with much more technical SEO expertise than me who might have a better answer.
What I do know id that Google Webmaster Tools data is not real time and can often take days to weeks to update. It could be that the reason GWT is showing something different about your robots.txt file is because it's old information that hasn't updated yet.
When I looked at your robots.txt file, I found two sitemaps, one with 2 URLs and one with 8 URLs. This is pretty tiny. Even in the old days, conventional wisdom was that it took at least 20 content pages in order for Google to take note and index the site.
Have you tried posting the URLs of your new site on Google+? I have heard that this is a great indexing tool in addition to the Fetch as Googlebot in GWT. Just a thought!
You know, there was a time when it took 6-8 weeks for a new site to get indexed. Google has definitely sped up to the point where I think we are all expecting instant results and sometimes that just doesn't happen.
I think this just might be a matter of patience. However, I am always willing to admit that I could be wrong and am interested to know what others think!
Dana
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
-
Utilizing one robots.txt for two sites
I have two sites that are facilitated hosting in similar CMS. Maybe than having two separate robots.txt records (one for every space), my web office has made one which records the sitemaps for the two sites, similar to this:
Technical SEO | | eulabrant0 -
Site address change: new site isn't showing up in Google, old site is gone.
We just transitioned mccacompanies.com to confluentstrategies.com. The problem is that when I search for the old name, the old website doesn't come up anymore to redirect people to the new site. On the local card, Google has even taken off the website altogether. (I'm currently still trying to gain access to manage the business listing) When I search for confluent strategies, the website doesn't come up at all. But if I use the site: operator, it is in the index. Basically, my client has effectively disappeared off the face of the Google. (In doing other name changes, this has never happened to me before) What can I do?
Technical SEO | | MichaelGregory0 -
Blocking Affiliate Links via robots.txt
Hi, I work with a client who has a large affiliate network pointing to their domain which is a large part of their inbound marketing strategy. All of these links point to a subdomain of affiliates.example.com, which then redirects the links through a 301 redirect to the relevant target page for the link. These links have been showing up in Webmaster Tools as top linking domains and also in the latest downloaded links reports. To follow guidelines and ensure that these links aren't counted by Google for either positive or negative impact on the site, we have added a block on the robots.txt of the affiliates.example.com subdomain, blocking search engines from crawling the full subddomain. The robots.txt file is the following code: User-agent: * Disallow: / We have authenticated the subdomain with Google Webmaster Tools and made certain that Google can reach and read the robots.txt file. We know they are being blocked from reading the affiliates subdomain. However, we added this affiliates subdomain block a few weeks ago to the robots.txt, but links are still showing up in the latest downloads report as first being discovered after we added the block. It's been a few weeks already, and we want to make sure that the block was implemented properly and that these links aren't being used to negatively impact the site. Any suggestions or clarification would be helpful - if the subdomain is being blocked for the search engines, why are the search engines following the links and reporting them in the www.example.com subdomain GWMT account as latest links. And if the block is implemented properly, will the total number of links pointing to our site as reported in the links to your site section be reduced, or does this not have an impact on that figure?From a development standpoint, it's a much easier fix for us to adjust the robots.txt file than to change the affiliate linking connection from a 301 to a 302, which is why we decided to go with this option.Any help you can offer will be greatly appreciated.Thanks,Mark
Technical SEO | | Mark_Ginsberg0 -
Can I rely on just robots.txt
We have a test version of a clients web site on a separate server before it goes onto the live server. Some code from the test site has some how managed to get Google to index the test site which isn't great! Would simply adding a robots text file to the root of test simply blocking all be good enough or will i have to put the meta tags for no index and no follow etc on all pages on the test site also?
Technical SEO | | spiralsites0 -
Is having no robots.txt file the same as having one and allowing all agents?
The site I am working on currently has no robots.txt file. However, I have just uploaded a sitemap and would like to point the robots.txt file to it. Once I upload the robots.txt file, if I allow access to all agents, is this the same as when the site had no robots.txt file at all; do I need to specify crawler access on can the robots.txt file just contain the link to the sitemap?
Technical SEO | | pugh0 -
Google is somehow linking my two sites that aren't linked! HELP
Good Morning... In my Google webmaster account it is showing an increase of backlinks between one site i own to the other.... This should not happen, as there are no links from one site to the other. I have thoroughly checked many pages on the new site to see if i can find a backlink, but i can't. Does anyone know why this is showing like this (google now shows 50,000 links from one site to the other).. Can someone please take a look and see if you can find any link from one to the other... original site : http://goo.gl/JgK1e new site : http://goo.gl/Jb4ng Please let me know why you guys think this is happening or if you were actually able to find a link on the new site pointing back to the old site... thanks a lot
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Removing a site from Google's index
We have a site we'd like to have pulled from Google's index. Back in late June, we disallowed robot access to the site through the robots.txt file and added a robots meta tag with "no index,no follow" commands. The expectation was that Google would eventually crawl the site and remove it from the index in response to those tags. The problem is that Google hasn't come back to crawl the site since late May. Is there a way to speed up this process and communicate to Google that we want the entire site out of the index, or do we just have to wait until it's eventually crawled again?
Technical SEO | | issuebasedmedia0 -
Why won't google rank my homepage
I have a site that ranks high on the first page for it's main keyword at both Bing and Yahoo but horribly at Google. It's a domain I recently acquired and am in the process of optimizing. My goal is to improve the relevancy for the site in Google so that the site shows up better for it's main keyword. With that said I've been working on building valuable links to the page and I would like some opinions on why the homepage is not ranking for the main keyword. Instead I have a junky content page that is ranking for the term. So in the event that you have a exact match domain showing up very high in Bing and Yahoo but not in Google for the homepage, what factors would you look at? Add in the complexity that a page other than the homepage is making grounds on the exact match keyword having moved up from "not in the top 100" to the 50's, what's my best solution to ranking the homepage? The site is optimized well and most inbound links predominantly point to the homepage.
Technical SEO | | DotCar0