Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Oh no googlebot can not access my robots.txt file
-
I just receive a n error message from google webmaster
Wonder it was something to do with Yoast plugin.
Could somebody help me with troubleshooting this?
Here's original message
Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 189 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%.
Recommended action
If the site error rate is 100%:
- Using a web browser, attempt to access http://www.soobumimphotography.com//robots.txt. If you are able to access it from your browser, then your site may be configured to deny access to googlebot. Check the configuration of your firewall and site to ensure that you are not denying access to googlebot.
- If your robots.txt is a static page, verify that your web service has proper permissions to access the file.
- If your robots.txt is dynamically generated, verify that the scripts that generate the robots.txt are properly configured and have permission to run. Check the logs for your website to see if your scripts are failing, and if so attempt to diagnose the cause of the failure.
If the site error rate is less than 100%:
- Using Webmaster Tools, find a day with a high error rate and examine the logs for your web server for that day. Look for errors accessing robots.txt in the logs for that day and fix the causes of those errors.
- The most likely explanation is that your site is overloaded. Contact your hosting provider and discuss reconfiguring your web server or adding more resources to your website.
After you think you've fixed the problem, use Fetch as Google to fetch http://www.soobumimphotography.com//robots.txt to verify that Googlebot can properly access your site.
-
I can open text file but Godaddy told me robots.txt file is not on my server (root level).
Also told me that my site is not crawled because robot.txt file is not there.
Basically all of those might have resulted from plug in I was using (term optimizer)
Based on what Godaddy told me, my .htaccess file was crashed because of that and had to be recreated. So now .htaceess file is good.
Now I have to figure out is why my site is not accessible from Googlebot.
Let me know Keith if this is a quick fix or need some time to troubleshoot. You can send me a message to discuss about fees if nessary.
Thanks again
-
Hi,
You have a robots.txt file here: http://www.soobumimphotography.com/robots.txt
Can you write this again in English so it makes sense?
"I called Godaddy and told me if I used any plug ins etc. Godaddy fixed .htaccss file and my site was up and runningjust fine."
Yes google xml sitemaps will add the location of your stitemap to the robots.txt file - but there is nothing wrong with your robots.txt file.
-
I just called Godaddy and told me that I don't have robots.txt tile. Can anyone help with this issue?
So here's what happen:
I purchased Joos de Vailk's Term Optimizer to consolidate tags etc.
As soon as I installed & opened it, my site crashed.
I called Godaddy and told me if I used any plug ins etc. Godaddy fixed .htaccss file and my site was up and runningjust fine.
Isn't plugin like the Google XML Sitemaps automatically generates robots.txt file?
-
Yes, my site was down.
-
I had a .htaccess issue past 24 hour with plug in and Godaddy had fixed it for me.
I think this caused problem.
I just fetched again and still getting unreachable page. I wonder if I have bad .htaccess file
-
Was your site down during this period?
I would recommend setting up pingdom.com (free site monitoring), this will email you if your site goes down - I suspect this is a hosting related issue.
FYI, I can access your robots.txt fine from here.
-
Hi Bistoss, You should log into Google Webmaster Tools to check the day the problem occurred. It is not uncommon for host to have problems that temporarily cause access problems. In some rare cases Google itself could be having problems. For example, in July we had 1 day with a 11% failure rate, it was the host. Since then no problems. If your problems are persistent, then you may have an issue like this: http://blog.jitbit.com/2012/08/fixing-googlebot-cant-access-your-site.html old Analytic code. Other things to look at is any recent changes, specifically anything that had to do with .htaccess Be sure to use the FETCH AS GOOGLE bot after any changes to verify that Google can now crawl your site. Hope this helps
-
I also use Robots Meta Configuration plug in
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
-
How can I get a photo album indexed by Google?
We have a lot of photos on our website. Unfortunately most of them don't seem to be indexed by Google. We run a party website. One of the things we do, is take pictures at events and put them on the site. An event page with a photo album, can have anywhere between 100 and 750 photo's. For each foto's there is a thumbnail on the page. The thumbnails are lazy loaded by showing a placeholder and loading the picture right before it comes onscreen. There is no pagination of infinite scrolling. Thumbnails don't have an alt text. Each thumbnail links to a picture page. This page only shows the base HTML structure (menu, etc), the image and a close button. The image has a src attribute with full size image, a srcset with several sizes for responsive design and an alt text. There is no real textual content on an image page. (Note that when a user clicks on the thumbnail, the large image is loaded using JavaScript and we mimic the page change. I think it doesn't matter, but am unsure.) I'd like that full size images should be indexed by Google and found with Google image search. Thumbnails should not be indexed (or ignored). Unfortunately most pictures aren't found or their thumbnail is shown. Moz is giving telling me that all the picture pages are duplicate content (19,521 issues), as they are all the same with the exception of the image. The page title isn't the same but similar for all images of an album. Example: On the "A day at the park" event page, we have 136 pictures. A site search on "a day at the park" foto, only reveals two photo's of the albums. 3QolbbI.png QTQVxqY.jpg mwEG90S.jpg
Technical SEO | | jasny0 -
One robots.txt file for multiple sites?
I have 2 sites hosted with Blue Host and was told to put the robots.txt in the root folder and just use the one robots.txt for both sites. Is this right? It seems wrong. I want to block certain things on one site. Thanks for the help, Rena
Technical SEO | | renalynd270 -
Good robots txt for magento
Dear Communtiy, I am trying to improve the SEO ratings for my website www.rijwielcashencarry.nl (magento). My next step will be implementing robots txt to exclude some crawling pages.
Technical SEO | | rijwielcashencarry040
Does anybody have a good magento robots txt for me? And what need i copy exactly? Thanks everybody! Greetings, Bob0 -
Why Can't Googlebot Fetch Its Own Map on Our Site?
I created a custom map using google maps creator and I embedded it on our site. However, when I ran the fetch and render through Search Console, it said it was blocked by our robots.txt file. I read in the Search Console Help section that: 'For resources blocked by robots.txt files that you don't own, reach out to the resource site owners and ask them to unblock those resources to Googlebot." I did not setup our robtos.txt file. However, I can't imagine it would be setup to block google from crawling a map. i will look into that, but before I go messing with it (since I'm not familiar with it) does google automatically block their maps from their own googlebot? Has anyone encountered this before? Here is what the robot.txt file says in Search Console: User-agent: * Allow: /maps/api/js? Allow: /maps/api/js/DirectionsService.Route Allow: /maps/api/js/DistanceMatrixService.GetDistanceMatrix Allow: /maps/api/js/ElevationService.GetElevationForLine Allow: /maps/api/js/GeocodeService.Search Allow: /maps/api/js/KmlOverlayService.GetFeature Allow: /maps/api/js/KmlOverlayService.GetOverlays Allow: /maps/api/js/LayersService.GetFeature Disallow: / Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ruben
Technical SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Is it important to include image files in your sitemap?
I run an ecommerce business that has over 4000 product pages which, as you can imagine, branches off into thousands of image files. Is it necessary to include those in my sitemap for faster indexing? Thanks for you help! -Reed
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby0 -
What can I do if my reconsideration request is rejected?
Last week I received an unnatural link warning from Google. Sad times. I followed the guidelines and reviewed all my inbound links for the last 3 months. All 5000 of them! Along with several genuine ones from trusted sites like BBC, Guardian and Telegraph there was a load of spam. About 2800 of them were junk. As we don't employ any SEO agency and don't buy links (we don't even buy adwords!) I know that all of this spam is generated by spam bots and site scrapers copying our content. As the bad links have not been created by us and there are 2800 of them I cannot hope to get them removed. There are no 'contact us' pages on these Russian spam directories and Indian scraper sites. And as for the 'adult book marking website' who have linked to us over 1000 times, well I couldn't even contact that site in company time if I wanted to! As a result i did my manual review all day, made a list of 2800 bad links and disavowed them. I followed this up with a reconsideration request to tell Google what I'd done but a week later this has been rejected "We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines." As these links are beyond my control and I've tried to disavow them is there anything more to be done? Cheers Steve
Technical SEO | | SteveBrumpton0 -
Googlebot does not obey robots.txt disallow
Hi Mozzers! We are trying to get Googlebot to steer away from our internal search results pages by adding a parameter "nocrawl=1" to facet/filter links and then robots.txt disallow all URLs containing that parameter. We implemented this late august and since that, the GWMT message "Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site", stopped coming. But today we received yet another. The weird thing is that Google gives many of our nowadays robots.txt disallowed URLs as examples of URLs that may cause us problems. What could be the reason? Best regards, Martin
Technical SEO | | TalkInThePark0 -
Can I remove 301 redirects after some time?
Hello, We have an very large number of 301 redirects on our site and would like to find a way to remove some of them. Is there a time frame after which Google does not need a 301 any more? For example if A is 301 redirected to B, does Google know after a while not to serve A any more, and replaces any requests for A with B? How about any links that go to A? Or: Is the only option to have all links that pointed to A point to B and then the 301 can be removed after some time? Thank you for you you help!
Technical SEO | | Veva0