What can I do if Google Webmaster Tools doesn't recognize the robots.txt file?
-
I'm working on a recently hacked site for a client and and in trying to identify how exactly the hack is running I need to use the fetch as Google bot feature in GWT.
I'd love to use this but it thinks the robots.txt is blocking it's acces but the only thing in the robots.txt file is a link to the sitemap.
Unde the Blocked URLs section of the GWT it shows that the robots.txt was last downloaded yesterday but it's incorrect information. Is there a way to force Google to look again?
-
No, but they might write to it, modify it, or do all sorts of other nasty stuff I've seen hackers do when they get a hold of any writeable file on a system.
-
lol it's a robots text file. what are they going to do. Steal it?
I should have clarified do a 777 to make sure that is not your problem, then yes change the permission to be tighter
-
Eesh I don't recommend 777. 644 or, if you're going to change it right back, 755 at most.
-
File permission maybe? Change it to 777 and try it again
-
If you have shell access on Linux you can use wget or GET or run lynx.
If google is getting the wrong robots file then your web server must be sending out something other than what you think is the robots file.
What happens if you do this in your browser:
-
Looking in my log files, Google hits robots.txt just about every time it crawls our site.
What are you trying to accomplish using fetch as Googlebot? Any chance CURL could do the job for you, or another tool that ignores robots.txt?
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
-
My backlinks are not showing in webmaster tools? Why
Hi Experts, I have follow backlinks from a domain for 6 months, but its not apear in Links to Your Site tools (search console) that domain has 302k indexed pages in google! Could you please explain me why google not showing this type of backlinks?
Technical SEO | | denakalami7 -
Content in Accordion doesn't rank as well as Content in Text box?
Does content rank better in a full view text layout, rather than in a clickable accordion? I read somewhere because users need to click into an accordion it may not rank as well, as it may be considered hidden on the page - is this true? accordion example: see features: https://www.workday.com/en-us/applications/student.html
Technical SEO | | DigitalCRO1 -
Google Webmaster Image Index Issue
I submitted the image sitemap in GWT and only few of them get indexed in google, but now the indexed images are also getting de-index. Any solution for it? See the attached E4hPDQE
Technical SEO | | tigersohelll0 -
Webmaster Tools Search Queries Data Drop
Hi I'm seeing a significant drop in search queries being reported for a client in GWT starting on the 7th Feb. I have seen a few articles on SERound Table etc saying that many are reporting probs like delays etc with GWT updating its data, such as these ones: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-webmaster-tools-data-stalled-19854.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-webmaster-tools-analytics-data-19870.html However these seem to suggest the problem is simply a delay with displayed data being updated, in the case im looking at the data is up to date but showing an increasing decline. When i look at Analytics data though the data is completely different. For exmaple GWT says on the 21st Feb there were 23 impressions with zero clicks but Analytics says there were 6 clicks/sessions from organic search. I take it this means that there is a likely problem with GWT data and I shouldn't worry ? All Best Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
WebMaster Tools keeps showing old 404 error but doesn't show a "Linked From" url. Why is that?
Hello Moz Community. I have a question about 404 crawl errors in WebmasterTools, a while ago we had an internal linking problem regarding some links formed in a wrong way (a loop was making links on the fly), this error was identified and fixed back then but before it was fixed google got to index lots of those malformed pages. Recently we see in our WebMaster account that some of this links still appearing as 404 but we currently don't have that issue or any internal link pointing to any of those URLs and what confuses us even more is that WebMaster doesn't show anything in the "Linked From" tab where it usually does for this type of errors, so we are wondering what this means, could be that they still in google's cache or memory? we are not really sure. If anyone has an idea of what this errors showing up now means we would really appreciate the help. Thanks. jZVh7zt.png
Technical SEO | | revimedia1 -
Robots.txt query
Quick question, if this appears in a clients robots.txt file, what does it mean? Disallow: /*/_/ Does it mean no pages can be indexed? I have checked and there are no pages in the index but it's a new site too so not sure if this is the problem. Thanks Karen
Technical SEO | | Karen_Dauncey0 -
Robots.txt
My campaign hse24 (www.hse24.de) is not being crawled any more ... Do you think this can be a problem of the robots.txt? I always thought that Google and friends are interpretating the file correct, seen that he site was crawled since last week. Thanks a lot Bernd NB: Here is the robots.txt: User-Agent: * Disallow: / User-agent: Googlebot User-agent: Googlebot-Image User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile User-agent: MSNBot User-agent: Slurp User-agent: yahoo-mmcrawler User-agent: psbot Disallow: /is-bin/ Allow: /is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/HSE24-DE-Site/de_DE/-/EUR/hse24_Storefront-Start Allow: /is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/HSE24-AT-Site/de_DE/-/EUR/hse24_Storefront-Start Allow: /is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/HSE24-CH-Site/de_DE/-/CHF/hse24_Storefront-Start Allow: /is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/HSE24-DE-Site/de_DE/-/EUR/hse24_DisplayProductInformation-Start Allow: /is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/HSE24-AT-Site/de_DE/-/EUR/hse24_DisplayProductInformation-Start Allow: /is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/HSE24-CH-Site/de_DE/-/CHF/hse24_DisplayProductInformation-Start Allow: /is-bin/intershop.static/WFS/HSE24-Site/-/Editions/ Allow: /is-bin/intershop.static/WFS/HSE24-Site/-/Editions/Root%20Edition/units/HSE24/Beratung/
Technical SEO | | remino630 -
Robots.txt File Redirects to Home Page
I've been doing some site analysis for a new SEO client and it has been brought to my attention that their robots.txt file redirects to their homepage. I was wondering: Is there a benfit to setup your robots.txt file to do this? Will this effect how their site will get indexed? Thanks for your response! Kyle Site URL: http://www.radisphere.net/
Technical SEO | | kchandler0