Our crawler was not able to access the robots.txt file on your site
-
Hello Mozzers!
I've received an error message saying the site can't be crawled because Moz is unable to access the robots.txt. I've spoken to the webmaster and he can't understand why the robot.txt can't be accessed in Moz.
https://www.thefurnshop.co.uk/robots.txt
and Google isn't flagging anything up to us.
Does anyone know how to solve this problem?
Thanks
-
@LoganRay This was our issue. Didn't know Moz tries to retrieve the HTTP robots.txt first. Our HTTPS redirect was not working on static files only, so the HTTP path to the robots.txt was failing. We did not notice it because the HSTS policy was forcing the browser to redirect.
-
Wanted to jump back in on this topic as I've just confirmed my initial suspicion.
I just added a new client to our Moz account and had the exact same issue, crawler unable to access the robots.txt file. It's a secure site and was configured in Moz without the HTTPS. When I go to the robots.txt file without https://www, it redirects to the same thing as yours where the / between the TLD and page path gets removed.
Reconfigure your site and it should begin to work.
-
There are 2 parts of your robots.txt that could be causing this, and it all just depends on how each bot is reading regular expressions in your robots.txt:
First, your Disallow: /? can be read as Disallow all paths starting with "/" with 0 to infinity characters "" and one character "?". Try replacing this part with Disallow: /*? to make it not crawl anything with a query string (which is what I believe you were going for).
Second, you have a open Disallow followed by the User-agent: rogerbot and while this should not be read this way, once again it all depends on how each bot reads the commands. To fix this you should change your Disallow following your Googlebot-Image as Disallow: /
-
Hi there,
There's something odd going on when I try to access your robots.txt file without the www. The www gets added back on, but when it does, the slash between the TLD and page path gets deleted, see below. I'm guessing your domain in Moz is configured without the www, which means RogerBot is getting redirected to this slash-less version of the file.
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
-
Can I access old data/keyword research if I cancel my Moz Pro account?
I'm currently on the free month trial period for Moz Pro and I will probably cancel the account before the free period ends, but if I want to renew my subscription later, what happens to all the previous data? And does all the keyword research I've done disappear when I cancel it, or is it restored when I renew the subscription? Any insight is helpful! Thank you!
Getting Started | | TeamOneRep0 -
Can Moz Monitor a JS Site?
We are building a new site that, on the blog landing page, uses JS to populate the individual blog article links on the page. The links are not viewable in the page source, but do appear once the page fully renders. After running an on-demand crawl of the site (in QA...not indexed yet), it appears that Moz isn't indexing these pages, and it also isn't reading other page elements that load later (like an H1 that is rendered in JS but not in page source). Are we going to be able to use Moz to track this site? Is there some setting to help?
Getting Started | | Rodrigo-DC0 -
Can't Crawl Site - but deducting crawls.
Why am I being deducted crawls if MOZ keeps telling me that it can't crawl my site?
Getting Started | | BloggyMoms1 -
Site with 2 domains - 1 domain SEO opimised & 1 is not. How best to handle crawlers?
Situation: I have a dual domain site:
Getting Started | | DGAU
Domain 1 - www.domain.com is SEO optimised with product pages and should of course be indexed.
Domain 2 - secure.domain.com is not SEO optimised and simply has checkout and payment gateway pages. I've discovered that Moz automatically crawls Domain 2 - the secure.domain.com site and consequently picks up hundreds of errors.
I have put an end to this by adding a robots.txt to stop rogerbot and dotbot (mozs crawlers) from crawling domain 2. This fixes my errors in Moz reports however after doing more research into 'Crawler Control' I figure this might be the best option. My Question: Instead of using robots.txt to stop moz from crawing all of Domain 2 should I use on each page of domain 2? I believe this would then allow moz and google to crawl Domain 2 but also tell them both not to index it.
My understanding is that this would be best, and might even help my overall SEO by telling google not to give any SEO value to the Domain 2 pages?0 -
Why is Moz unable to crawl my site?
Was hoping someone could advise why Moz is unable to crawl my site at https://www.oceaniacruises.com **Moz was unable to crawl your site on Oct 5, 2017. **Our crawler was banned by a page on your site, either through your robots.txt, the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, or the meta robots tag. Update these tags to allow your page and the rest of your site to be crawled. If this error is found on any page on your site, it prevents our crawler (and some search engines) from crawling the rest of your site. Typically errors like this should be investigated and fixed by the site webmaster. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Getting Started | | jbarinaga0 -
So the page-grader is giving my site an A, but it is ranking below some websites that the grader gives an F to. What is the point of the page grader?
Basically, I am new to this..very new. In fact, my field was neuroscience, and now I work in marketing.. I just started using seomoz, and for one website that I build. I followed all of the guidelines moz has to offer. On the grade section, I got an for a specific keyword. However, when I rate my site for that keyword, it does not even rank in the top 50. The keyword is even in the domain! Also, some sites that rank in the top 25 have an F rating for the same keyword. Why do they rank higher?
Getting Started | | Meier0 -
How to give access, invite additional users?
We have Standard subscription to Moz Analytics. I can't find option to how to give other team members access to view the analytics. I need other team members just to view same analytics profile, no need for them to create or modify profiles. Can anyone point me where do I invite other team members? Thanks.
Getting Started | | romanr0 -
Whenever I try to access campaigns in moz pro I get an error page
I recently signed-up for a new pro account. As I was adding my first subdomain everything was fine until I was asked to link to GA, when I clicked yes I got this error message: 403 Forbidden Now every time I click on set-up campaign I get taken to a page with nothing but the 403 Forbidden text.
Getting Started | | Toptal0