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
-
Has anyone ever tested to see if having an ads.txt file provided any SEO lift?
I know that the ads.txt system is designed to prevent ad fraud and technically has nothing to do with search. That said, the presence of such a file would seem to be an indicator of overall site quality because it would show that a site owner wants to participate in a fraud-free system. Has anyone ever tested that? If so, they don't seem to have published their results. Maybe it's a secret weapon that some pros are using and not sharing?
Web Design | | scodtt0 -
Reason for robots.txt file blocking products on category pages?
Hi I have a website with thosands of products. On the category pages, all the products are linked to with the code “?cgid” in the URL. But “?cgid” is also blocked in the robots.txt file for some reason. So I'm thinking it's stopping all my products getting crawled by Google. Am I right here? Is there any reason why a website would want to limit so many URL's? I'm only here a week and the sites getting great traffic, so don't want to go breaking it!!! Thanks
Web Design | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
Dead end pages are really an issue?
Hi all, We have many pages which are help guides to our features. These pages do not have anymore outgoing links (internal / external). We haven't linked as these are already 4th level pages and specific about particular topic. So these are technically dead end pages. Do these pages really hurt us? We need to link to some other pages? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Fixing Render Blocking Javascript and CSS in the Above-the-fold content
We don't have a responsive design site yet, and our mobile site is built through Dudamobile. I know it's not the best, but I'm trying to do whatever we can until we get around to redesigning it. Is there anything I can do about the following Page Speed Insight errors or are they just a function of using Dudamobile? Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content Your page has 3 blocking script resources and 5 blocking CSS resources. This causes a delay in rendering your page.None of the above-the-fold content on your page could be rendered without waiting for the following resources to load. Try to defer or asynchronously load blocking resources, or inline the critical portions of those resources directly in the HTML.Remove render-blocking JavaScript: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js http://mobile.dudamobile.com/…ckage.min.js?version=2015-04-02T13:36:04 http://mobile.dudamobile.com/…pts/blogs.js?version=2015-04-02T13:36:04 Optimize CSS Delivery of the following: http://fonts.googleapis.com/…:400|Great+Vibes|Signika:400,300,600,700 http://mobile.dudamobile.com/…ont-pack.css?version=2015-04-02T13:36:04 http://mobile.dudamobile.com/…kage.min.css?version=2015-04-02T13:36:04 http://irp-cdn.multiscreensite.com/kempruge/files/kempruge_0.min.css?v=6 http://irp-cdn.multiscreensite.com/…mpruge/files/kempruge_home_0.min.css?v=6 Thanks for any tips, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Crawler issues
Can anyone please suggest why our site is not being crawled by Google at the moment? Thanks,
Web Design | | CheethamBellJWT0 -
Search directory - How to apply robots
Hi. On the site I'm working on, we use a search directory to display our search results. It displays as follows - Mydomain.com/search-results/# With the dynamic search results appearing after the hash tag. Because of the structure of the website, many of the lefthand nav defers back to this directory. I know that most websites "noindex, nofollow" the search results pages, but due to the ease of customers generating them, I'm afraid that if I do this, we'll miss out on the inevitable links customers will provide...and, even though it's just the main search directory, these links will still help my domain. The search is all java-generated so there's nothing for spiders to follow within this directory - save the standard category nav. How should I handle this? Thanks.
Web Design | | Blenny0 -
Landing Page/Home Page issues
Hi. I was speaking with my designer last night (we are setting up a new website) and we were discussing the design of our homepage, now the designer said he wanted the first page of the website to be a sort of landing page page were the visitor has to click and enter, im sure everyone has all come across these before. However, I am concerned as to the SEO implications of this? Any help guys?
Web Design | | CompleteOffice0 -
Correct use for Robots.txt
I'm in the process of building a website and am experimenting with some new pages. I don't want search engines to begin crawling the site yet. I would like to add the Robot.txt on my pages that I don't want them to crawl. If I do this, can I remove it later and get them to crawl those pages?
Web Design | | EricVallee340