Do I have a robots.txt problem?
-
I have the little yellow exclamation point under my robots.txt fetch as you can see here- http://imgur.com/wuWdtvO
This version shows no errors or warnings- http://imgur.com/uqbmbug
Under the tester I can currently see the latest version. This site hasn't changed URLs recently, and we haven't made any changes to the robots.txt file for two years. This problem just started in the last month. Should I worry?
-
Today it has a green check mark, and absolutely no changes were made to the website since I asked this question.
-
It could be that your server had a hard time when Google tried to view your robots.txt file that's why it wouldn't be able to fetch it. As long as this issue doesn't prevent Google anymore in the future it's not much to worry about.
-
That would make me feel more confident of a false error being reported. Time to closely monitor the crawl logs, look at server stats, and keep an eye on GWT for a change in the reporting/indexing. I would also go into the GWT forums and post, see if anyone is reporting a similar error these past couple days.
-
I can't post the domain but I know it is accessible.
When I go to the tester it shows the live robots.txt with no problems. I also can look at the server logs and see that it is being crawled, but being crawled less then Bing Crawls. Also the Bing Webmaster Tools is showing no problems.
-
Can you post your domain? Manually checking the robots.txt file would help.
I've checked many of my GWT accounts and I am not showing a sudden robots.txt error. It could be a false error, but I would take anything with the robots.txt file seriously. You'll want to make sure that it is in fact accessible to all the crawlers desired.
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
-
Will it be possible to point diff sitemap to same robots.txt file.
Will it be possible to point diff sitemap to same robots.txt file.
Technical SEO | | nlogix
Please advice.0 -
If I sell custom sticker products and have similar titles, is it a problem?
Hi, We're running a rather new website at www.redrockdecals.com and we sell mainly sticker products. I would just like to clarify on something that is bugging me and I just can't go forward with other products until I know the answers. I'd appreciate the help so much. We sell for example license plate products for different European countries. I have figured out the best title for the page would be for example "Custom Catalonia License Plate" and the primary keyword in this is Catalonia license plate since that's what actually gets some searches from Google and therefore I have used that without the word "custom" in the product description text. I guess it's a good idea to write totally different description texts for all of these license plate pages so that's what I've been doing. Now the question is - does google accept the fact that I have different product titles like Custom Catalonia License Plate, Custom Germany License Plate etc so just the country name differs on all of these pages? Or should I play around with the titles and word orders also? There is one part on the product page where we describe for example the temperature ranges and other specifications about the sticker material as you can see here: http://www.redrockdecals.com/custom-slovakia-license-plate Is it ok to copy-paste that text to all of the pages if the short descriptions on top of the product page are different?
Technical SEO | | speedbird12290 -
Empty Meta Robots Directive - Harmful?
Hi, We had a coding update and a side-effect of that was that our directive was emptied, in other words it now reads as: on all of the site. I've since noticed that Google's cache date on all of the pages - at least, the ones I tested - have a Cached date of no later than 17 December '12 - that's the Monday after the directive was removed on mass. So, A, does anyone have solid evidence of an empty directive causing problems? Past experience, Matt Cutts, Fishkin quote, etc. And then B - It seems fairly well correlated but, does my entire site's homogenous Cached date point to this tag removal? Or is it fairly normal to have a particular cache date across a large site (we're a large ecommerce site). Our site: http://www.zando.co.za/ I'm having the directive reinstated as soon as Dev permitting. And then, for extra credit, is there a way with Google's API, or perhaps some other tool, to run an arbitrary list and retrieve Cached dates? I'd want to do this for diagnosis purposes and preferably in a way that OK with Google. I'd avoid CURLing for the cached URL and scraping out that dates with BASH, or any such kind of thing. Cheers,
Technical SEO | | RocketZando0 -
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.
Technical SEO | | BistosAmerica0 -
Google (GWT) says my homepage and posts are blocked by Robots.txt
I guys.. I have a very annoying issue.. My Wordpress-blog over at www.Trovatten.com has some indexation-problems.. Google Webmaster Tools data:
Technical SEO | | FrederikTrovatten22
GWT says the following: "Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt." and shows me my homepage and my blogposts.. This is my Robots.txt: http://www.trovatten.com/robots.txt
"User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/ Do you have any idea why it says that the URL's are being blocked by robots.txt when that looks how it should?
I've read a couple of places that it can be because of a Wordpress Plugin that is creating a virtuel robots.txt, but I can't validate it.. 1. I have set WP-Privacy to crawl my site
2. I have deactivated all WP-plugins and I still get same GWT-Warnings. Looking forward to hear if you have an idea that might work!0 -
Problem with 1 Domain but not 60 Others
Hi, I have about 60+ domains which are spread across a few different IP address's and a couple of Servers The domains use the same template, which is modified per the specific domain Out of the 60, a single domain attracts virtually no traffic. In google webmaster, there are no messages, nothing out of the order The supporting blogs etc... for that domain are all fine. Any idea why one domain does not perform, while the other 60 plug are successful?
Technical SEO | | Bucky0 -
Robots.txt question
Hello, What does the following command mean - User-agent: * Allow: / Does it mean that we are blocking all spiders ? Is Allow supported in robots.txt ? Thanks
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Use of Robots.txt file on a job site
We are performing SEO on a large niche Job Board. My question revolves around the thought of no following all the actual job postings from their clients as they only last for 30 to 60 days. Anybody have any idea on the best way to handle this?
Technical SEO | | WebTalent0