Scary bug in search console: All our pages reported as being blocked by robots.txt after https migration
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We just migrated to https and created 2 days ago a new property in search console for the https domain.
Webmaster Tools account for the https domain now shows for every page in our sitemap the warning: "Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt."Also in the dashboard of the search console it shows a red triangle with warning that our root domain would be blocked by robots.txt. 1) When I test the URLs in search console robots.txt test tool all looks fine.2) When I fetch as google and render the page it renders and indexes without problem (would not if it was really blocked in robots.txt)3) We temporarily completely emptied the robots.txt, submitted it in search console and uploaded sitemap again and same warnings even though no robots.txt was online4) We run screaming frog crawl on whole website and it indicates that there is no page blocked by robots.txt5) We carefully revised the whole robots.txt and it does not contain any row that blocks relevant content on our site or our root domain. (same robots.txt was online for last decade in http version without problem)6) In big webmaster tools I could upload the sitemap and so far no error reported.7) we resubmitted sitemaps and same issue8) I see our root domain already with https in google SERPThe site is https://www.languagecourse.netSince the site has significant traffic, if google would really interpret for any reason that our site is blocked by robots we will be in serious trouble.
This is really scary, so even if it is just a bug in search console and does not affect crawling of the site, it would be great if someone from google could have a look into the reason for this since for a site owner this really can increase cortisol to unhealthy levels.Anybody ever experienced the same problem?Anybody has an idea where we could report/post this issue? -
Hi icourse, thanks for your question! You've received some thoughtful responses. Did any of them help you sort your issue out? If so, please mark one or more as a "Good Answer." Thanks!
Christy
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I'd still speak with the hosting provider. It may be a firewall setting, not the CDN.
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Hi Donna, we are using cloudflare which may have blocked your scan/bot.
We disabled cloudflare temporarily and submitted new robots.txt and new sitemap and still get the same warnings. -
I recently updated a Wordpress website from noindex to wanting it indexed and I still had a warning in Search Console for a day or two and the homepage was initially indexed with the meta description saying "A description for this website ...", even though the actual Fetch and Render and also Robots.txt test was just fine. If you are absolutely sure there isn't anything wrong, I would maybe give it a couple of days. In our case, I resubmitted the homepage to Google to speed up the process and that fixed it.
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Have you checked with your website hosting provider? They may be blocking bots at a server level. I know when I tried to scan your site I got a connection timeout error.
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