Wordpress error
-
On our Google Webmaster Tools I'm getting a Severe Health Warning regarding our Robot.txt file reading:
User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 20User-agent: 008
Disallow: /I'm wondering how I can fix this and stop it happening again.
The site was hacked about 4 months ago but I thought we'd managed to clear things up.
Colin
-
This will be my first post on SEOmoz so bear with me
The way I understand it is that robots read the robots.txt file from top to bottom, and once they find a rule that applies to them they stop reading and begin crawling. So basically the robots.txt written as:
User-agent:*
Disallow:
Crawl-delay: 20
User-agent: 008
Disallow: /
would not have the desired result as user-agent 008 would first read the top guideline:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Crawl-delay: 20
and then begin crawling your site, as it is first being told that All user-agents are disallowed to crawl no pages or directories.
The corrected way to write this would be:
User-agent: 008
Disallow: /
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Crawl-delay: 20
-
Hi Peter,
I've tested the robot.txt file in Webmaster Tools and it now seems to be working as it should and it seems Google is seeing the same file as I have on the server.
I'm afraid this side of things isn't' my area of expertise so it's been a bit of a minefield.
I've taken a subscription with sucuri.net and taken various other steps that hopefully will hel;p with security. But who knows?
Thanks,
Colin
-
Google is seeing the same Robots.txt content (in GWT) that you show in the physical file, right? I just want to make sure that, when the site was hacked, no changes were made that are showing different versions of files to Google. It sounds like that's not the case here, but it definitely can happen.
-
Blog isn't' showing now and my hosts say that the index.php file is missing from the directory but I can see it.
Strange.
Have contacted them again to see what the problem can be.
Bit of a wasted Saturday!
-
Thanks Keith. Just contacting out hosts.
Nightmare!
-
Looks like a 403 permissions problem, that's a server side error... Make sure you have the correct permissions set on the blog folder in IIS Personally I always host on Linux...
-
Mind you the whole blog is now showing an error message and cant' be viewed so looks like an afternoon of trial and error!
-
Thanks very much Keith. I've just edited the file as suggested.
I see the error but as I am the web guy I cant' figure out how to get rid of it.
I think it might be a plugin that's causing it so I'm going to disable the and re-able them one as a time.
I've just PM'd you by the way.
Thanks for your help Keith.
Colin
-
Use this:
**User-agent: * Disallow: /blog/wp-admin/ Disallow: /blog/wp-includes/ Sitemap: http://nile-cruises-4u.co.uk/sitemap.xml**
Any FYI, you have the following error on your blog:
Warning: is_readable() [function.is-readable]: open_basedir restriction in effect. File(D:\home\nile-cruises-4u.co.uk\wwwroot\blog/wp-content/plugins/D:\home\nile-cruises-4u.co.uk\wwwroot\blog\wp-content\plugins\websitedefender-wordpress-security/languages/WSDWP_SECURITY-en_US.mo) is not within the allowed path(s): (D:\home\nile-cruises-4u.co.uk\wwwroot) in D:\home\nile-cruises-4u.co.uk\wwwroot\blog\wp-includes\l10n.php on line **339 **
Get your web guy to look at that, it appears at the top of every blog page for me...
Hope that helps,
Keith
-
Thanks Keith.
Only part of our site is WP based. Would that be a problem using the example you kindly suggested?
-
I gave you an example of a basic robots.txt file that I use on one of my Wordpress sites above, I would suggest using that for now.
I would not bother messing around with crawl delay in robots.txt as Peter said above there are better ways to achieve this... Plus I doubt you need it any way.
Google caches the robots.txt info for about 24hrs normally in my experience... So it's possible the old cached version is still being used by Google.
-
Hi Guys,
Thanks so much for your help. As you say Troy, that's defintely not what I want.
I assumed when we were hacked (twice in 8 months) that it might have been a competitor as we are in a very competitive niche. Might be very wrong there but we have certainly lost our top ranking on Google.co.uk for our main key phrases and our now at about position 7 for the same key phrases after about 3 years at number 1.
So when I saw on Google Webmaster Tools yesterday that we had a severe health warning and that the Googlebot was being prevented crawling our site I thought it might be the aftereffects of the hack.
Today even though I changed the robot.txt file yesterday GWT is showing 1000 pages with errors, 285 Access Denied and 719 Not Found and this message: Googlebot is blocked from http://nile-cruises-4u.co.uk/
I've just tested the robot.txt via GWT and now get this message:
AllowedDetected as a directory; specific files may have different restrictionsSo maybe the pages will be able to access by Googlebot shortly and the Access Denied message will disappear.I've chaged the robot.txt file to
User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 20But should I change it to a better version? Sorry guys, I'm an online travel agent and not great on coding and really techie stuff. Although I'm learning pretty quickly about the bad stuff!I seem to have a few problems getting this sorted and wonder if this is a part of why our page position is dropping? -
I would simplify your robots.txt to read something like:
**User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ Sitemap: http://www.your-domain.com/sitemap.xml**
-
That's odd: "008" appears to be the user agent for "80legs", a custom crawler platform. I'm seeing it in other Robots.txt files.
-
I'm not 100% sure what he's seeing, but when I plug his robots.txt into the robots analysis tool, I get this back:
Googlebot blocked by line 5: Disallow: /
Detected as a directory; specific files may have different restrictions
However, when I gave the top "**User-agent: ***" the "Disallow: " it seemed to fix the problem. Like, it didn't understand that the **Disallow: / **was meant only for the 008 user-agent?
-
Not honestly sure what User-agent "008" is, but that seems harmless. Why the crawl delay? There are better ways to handle that than Robots.txt, if a crawler is giving you trouble.
Was there a specific message/error in GWT?
-
I think, if you have a robots.txt reading what you show above:
User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 20
User-agent: 008 Disallow: /
That just basically says, "Don't crawl my site at all" (The "Disallow: /" means, I'm not allowing anything to be crawled by any search engine that pays attention to robots.txt at all)
So...I'm guessing that's not what you want?
(Bah..ignore. "User-agent". I'm a fool)
Actually, this seems to have solved your issue...make sure you explicitly tell all other User-agents that they are allowed:
User-agent: * Disallow: Crawl-delay: 20
User-agent: 008 Disallow: /
The extra "Disallow:" under User-agent: * says "I'm not going to disallow anything to most user-agents." Then the Disallow under user-agent 008 seems to only apply to them.
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
-
404 Errors flaring on nonexistent or unpublished pages – should we be concerned for SEO?
Hello! We keep getting "critical crawler" notifications on Moz because of firing 404 codes. We've checked each page and know that we are not linking to them anywhere on our site, they are not published and they are not indexed on Google. It's only happened since we migrated our blog to Hubspot so we think it has something to do with the test pages their developers had set up and that they are just lingering in our code somewhere. However, we are still concerned having these codes fire implies negative consequences for our SEO. Is this the case? Should we be concerned about these 404 codes despite the pages from those URLs not actually existing? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DebFF
Chloe0 -
Redirect wordpress from /%post_id%/%postname%/ to /blog/%postname%/
Hi what is the code to redirect wordpress blog from site.com/%post_id%/%postname%/ to site.com/blog/%postname%/ We are moving the site to a new server and new url structure. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
All of my blog titles have disappeared. In need of Wordpress help.
Not sure if this is the right place to ask this question but here it goes. All of the titles on my real estate website have disappeared. I have spent hours looking through different forums trying to figure out how to make them show up. Also whenever I hover the cursor over links they turn to white and disappear as well. This is the website: http://www.acolerealty.com/blog/ If this helps here is the custom CSS in worpress is the following: /* GREEN */ body {background: #eff3ec !important;} .header-membership {
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | artscube.biz
background: #fff !important;
box-shadow: none !important;
border-bottom: 2px solid #e5e9e3 !important;
} .header-membership a {
color: #909090 !important;
text-shadow: none !important
} h1#site-title a {
color: #397249 !important;
} header nav#main-nav {
background: #7aad79 !important; /* Old browsers /
background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%, #397249 100%) !important; / FF3.6+ /
background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#7aad79), color-stop(100%,#397249)) !important; / Chrome,Safari4+ /
background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%); / Chrome10+,Safari5.1+ /
background: -o-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%) !important; / Opera 11.10+ /
background: -ms-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%) !important; / IE10+ /
background: linear-gradient(to bottom, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%) !important; / W3C /
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#7aad79', endColorstr='#397249',GradientType=0 ) !important; / IE6-9 */
} #t-header-container .home-search-container #header-top-search::before {
background: #7aad79 !important; /* Old browsers /
background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%, #397249 100%) !important; / FF3.6+ /
background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#7aad79), color-stop(100%,#397249)) !important; / Chrome,Safari4+ /
background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%); / Chrome10+,Safari5.1+ /
background: -o-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%) !important; / Opera 11.10+ /
background: -ms-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%) !important; / IE10+ /
background: linear-gradient(to bottom, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%) !important; / W3C /
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#7aad79', endColorstr='#397249',GradientType=0 ) !important; / IE6-9 */
} input.button-primary {
background: #7aad79 !important; /* Old browsers /
background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%, #397249 100%) !important; / FF3.6+ /
background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#7aad79), color-stop(100%,#397249)) !important; / Chrome,Safari4+ /
background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%); / Chrome10+,Safari5.1+ /
background: -o-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%) !important; / Opera 11.10+ /
background: -ms-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%) !important; / IE10+ /
background: linear-gradient(to bottom, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%) !important; / W3C /
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#7aad79', endColorstr='#397249',GradientType=0 ) !important; / IE6-9 */ border:1px solid #23472d !important;
} input.button-primary:hover {
background: #628b61 !important;
} footer {
background: #e4e8e1 !important;
}0 -
Custom Google Search & Joomla/Wordpress
If you install google custom search on a site - does it record a list of all the searches people type into the search box? Is there a Joomla & Wordpress Search plugin/extension that keeps a track of the search history used on your site(s).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
How important are sitemap errors?
If there aren't any crawling / indexing issues with your site, how important do thing sitemap errors are? Do you work to always fix all errors? I know here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/bings-duane-forrester-on-webmaster-tools-metrics-and-sitemap-quality-thresholds Duane Forrester mentions that sites with many 302's 301's will be punished--does any one know Googe's take on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Wordpress No 404
Hello, My issue is that in wordpress 404 does not seem to be working properly. An example of this is: sitename.com/category/catname loads the files in that category but I can also type sitename.com/category/asdasfaasd/catname and it still goes to the posts in that category and does not 404. I can replace the misc text with anything and it does not 404. My worry is that this can be used to exploit duplicate content. I've looked at a couple of other sites and they do the same. I'm using Yoast as my SEO plugin and my theme is elogix from themeforest. I've tried disabling all plugins, cloudflare and changing theme and the same issue exists. If anyone can help it would be extremely appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LukeHutchinson0 -
403, 301, 302, 404 errors & possible google penalty
William Rock ran a Xenu site scan on nlpca(dot)com and mentioned the following: ...ran a test with Xenu site scan and it found a lot of broken links with 403, 301, 302, 404 Errors. Other items found: Broken page-local links (also named 'anchors', 'fragmentidentifiers'): http://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/Interesting_NLP_Sites.html#null anchor occurs multiple timeshttp://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/Interesting_NLP_Sites.html#US not found Could somone give us an output of that list, and which ones of these errors do we need to clean up for SEO purposes? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Simple Press forum for wordpress
I'm using a forum plugin called Simple Press, and the rest of my site is looking good with only a few minor errors due to a long url. Anyway, the only 4 major errors I have are these; These 3 links have no titles, so is there somewhere I can give them titles, or do a rel=nofollow? /index.php?sf_ahah=acknowledge /index.php?sf_ahah=permissions /index.php?sf_ahah=tags And then the 3 above plus this one; http://www.societyforethicsand…..?xfeed=all Have no META DESCRIPTION associated with them. So, is there somewhere I can add the meta description for all 4? I have spoken to support, and it turns out the first 3 links with no titles are ajax content for pop ups, instead of waiting for them to work out how to resolve this issue, does anyone know how to stop them coming up as major errors?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CosmikCarrot0