Robots.txt error
-
Moz Crawler is not able to access the robots.txt due to server error. Please advice on how to tackle the server error.
-
Hello Shanidel,
Jo from the Moz help team here.
I've had a look at your site and I've not been able to access your robot.txt file, this is what I'm seeing in the browser
https://screencast.com/t/JjQI1WTH3ni
I'm also seeing this error when I check your robots.txt file through a third party tool
https://screencast.com/t/pxsP9pL5
So it looks to me like may be some intermittent issues with your robots.txt file. I would advise reaching out to your web developer to see if they can check your robots.txt file and make sure it's accessible.
If you're still having trouble please let us know at help@moz.com
Best of luck!
Jo
-
Hi,
I'm still having this problem. Moz is unable to crawl the site saying there is a problem with the robots.txt file.
Sorry.
-
happy to been useful
-
Below is the exact message that i received:
**Moz was unable to crawl your site on Aug 29, 2017. **Our crawler was not able to access the robots.txt file on your site. This often occurs because of a server error from the robots.txt. Although this may have been caused by a temporary outage, we recommend making sure your robots.txt file is accessible and that your network and server are working correctly. Typically errors like this should be investigated and fixed by the site webmaster.
-
yoursite.com/robot.txt -----> this is how your robot.txt file should be, so first I will recommend you test your robot.txt file to see if everything is ok, if dont there is an explanation about how to create a robot.txt
How to create a /robots.txt file
Where to put it
The short answer: in the top-level directory of your web server.
The longer answer:
When a robot looks for the "/robots.txt" file for URL, it strips the path component from the URL (everything from the first single slash), and puts "/robots.txt" in its place.
For example, for "http://www.example.com/shop/index.html, it will remove the "/shop/index.html", and replace it with "/robots.txt", and will end up with "http://www.example.com/robots.txt".
So, as a web site owner you need to put it in the right place on your web server for that resulting URL to work. Usually that is the same place where you put your web site's main "index.html" welcome page. Where exactly that is, and how to put the file there, depends on your web server software.
Remember to use all lower case for the filename: "robots.txt", not "Robots.TXT.
See also:
-
Hi,
Can you please share the message you're receiving ? Also, did you check your Google Search Console to see if Google can access to your website ? Knowing the type of errors is the key to advice you.
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
-
Search Console - Mobile Usability Errors
A site I'm looking at for a client had 100's of pages flagged as having Mobile Usability errors in Search Console. I found that the theme uses parameters in the URLs of some of theme resources (.js/.css) to identify the version strings. These were then being blocked by a rule in the robots.txt: "Disallow: /*?" I've removed this rule, and now when I inspect URLs and test the live versions of the page they are now being reported as mobile friendly. I then submitted validation requests in Search Console for both of the errors ("Text to small" and "Clickable Elements too close") My problem now, is that the validation has completed and the pages are still being reported as having the errors. I've double checked and they're find if I inspect them individually. Does anyone else have experience clearing these issues in Search Console? Any ideas what's going on here!
Technical SEO | | DougRoberts1 -
Website crawl error
Hi all, When I try to crawl a website, I got next error message: "java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Illegal cookie name" For the moment, I found next explanation: The errors indicate that one of the web servers within the same cookie domain as the server is setting a cookie for your domain with the name "path", as well as another cookie with the name "domain" Does anyone has experience with this problem, knows what it means and knows how to solve it? Thanks in advance! Jens
Technical SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE0 -
429 Errors?
I have over 500,000 429 errors in webmaster tools. Do I need to be concerned about these errors?
Technical SEO | | TheKrazyCouponLady0 -
What could be the cause of this duplicate content error?
I only have one index.htm and I'm seeing a duplicate content error. What could be causing this? IUJvfZE.png
Technical SEO | | ScottMcPherson1 -
How to fix duplicate page content error?
SEOmoz's Crawl Diagnostics is complaining about a duplicate page error. The example of links that has duplicate page content error are http://www.equipnet.com/misc-spare-motors-and-pumps_listid_348855 http://www.equipnet.com/misc-spare-motors-and-pumps_listid_348852 These are not duplicate pages. There are some values that are different on both pages like listing # , equipnet tag # , price. I am not sure how do highlight the different things the two page has like the "Equipment Tag # and listing #". Do they resolve if i use some style attribute to highlight such values on page? Please help me with this as i am not really sure why seo is thinking that both pages have same content. Thanks !!!
Technical SEO | | RGEQUIPNET0 -
SEOMoz Crawling Errors
I recently implemented a blog using WordPress on our website. I didn't use WordPress as the CMS for the rest of our site just the blog portion. So as an example I installed Wordpress in http://www.mysite/blog/" not in the root. My error report in SEOMoz went from 0 to 22e. The Moz bot or crawler that SEOMoz uses is reporting a ton of 4xx errors to strang links that shouldn't exist anywhere on the site. Example: Good link - http://www.mysite/products.html Bad link reported by SEOMoz - http://www.mysite/blog/my-first-post/products.html I've also noticed that my page speed as become much slower as reported by Google. Does anybody know what could be happening here? I know that typically it's better to install WordPress in the root and use it to control the entire site but I was under the gun to get a blog out. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TRICORSystems0 -
Robots.txt and canonical tag
In the SEOmoz post - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts, it's being said - If you have a robots.txt disallow in place for a page, the canonical tag will never be seen. Does it so happen that if a page is disallowed by robots.txt, spiders DO NOT read the html code ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Trying to reduce pages crawled to within 10K limit via robots.txt
Our site has far too many pages for our 10K page PRO account which are not SEO worthy. In fact, only about 2000 pages qualify for SEO value. Limitations of the store software only permit me to use robots.txt to sculpt the rogerbot site crawl. However, I am having trouble getting this to work. Our biggest problem is the 35K individual product pages and the related shopping cart links (at least another 35K); these aren't needed as they duplicate the SEO-worthy content in the product category pages. The signature of a product page is that it is contained within a folder ending in -p. So I made the following addition to robots.txt: User-agent: rogerbot
Technical SEO | | AspenFasteners
Disallow: /-p/ However, the latest crawl results show the 10K limit is still being exceeded. I went to Crawl Diagnostics and clicked on Export Latest Crawl to CSV. To my dismay I saw the report was overflowing with product page links: e.g. www.aspenfasteners.com/3-Star-tm-Bulbing-Type-Blind-Rivets-Anodized-p/rv006-316x039354-coan.htm The value for the column "Search Engine blocked by robots.txt" = FALSE; does this mean blocked for all search engines? Then it's correct. If it means "blocked for rogerbot? Then it shouldn't even be in the report, as the report seems to only contain 10K pages. Any thoughts or hints on trying to attain my goal would REALLY be appreciated, I've been trying for weeks now. Honestly - virtual beers for everyone! Carlo0