Do I have a robots.txt problem?
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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?
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Today it has a green check mark, and absolutely no changes were made to the website since I asked this question.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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