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 Error Complications
Hello Moz World! I am receiving a 404 error on one of my webpages. When I directly input the URL into my search bar I receive a 404 error. However, when I am on my website and link over to the broken webpage from my website I do not receive an error. The page will show up with no issues, and the address in the URL is the address that is receiving the 404 error. i.e. www.mywebsite.com/services Does anyone know how i should go about troubleshooting this issue? Any suggestions on how I can resolve this? To me, I would think that if the link is not broken when being directed from the website, it shouldn't be broken when entering the url directly into the search bar. Right? Any info/advice is appreciated. B/R Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarketingChimp100 -
Can you no index a page in Wordpress from just Google news?
I'm trying to find a plugin for Wordpress that enables you to no-index an individual page from Google news but not from Google search results. We want to remove some of our pages from Google news without hurting others.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | uSw0 -
Pages Titles in SERPs - Wordpress Site
In Google SERPs we have several websites (built in wordpress) who's pages are being displayed without using the page title - is this google ignoring the page title or is there a problem in our code - also if this is google is it still taking notice of the page title to determine what content is on the page?I have read several articles on this but wondered if someone can advise - I can provide the URL if required.Also I wanted to 100% that our robots.txt is behaving its self.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Why are Pages returning 404 errors not being dropped?
Our webmaster tools continues to return anywhere upwards of 750 pages that have 404 errors. These are from pages of a previous site no longer used. However this was over 1 year ago these pages were dropped along with the 301 re-directs. Why is Google not clearing these from webmaster tools but re-listing them again after 3 month cycle? Is it because external sites have links to these pages? If so should I put a 301 in place (most of these site are forums and potentially dodgy directories etc from previous poor link building programs) or ask for a manual removal?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Best way to duplicate a wordpress site for staging purposes?
I want to make some changes to my Wordpress site, and want to somehow set up a live staging area. Does anyone know of a good way to do this? I want all of the same content there I just want to be able to make changes to it and try it all out before going live. Any thoughts on this? Also I want to be sure the staging site doesn't get indexed since it will be a complete duplicate of my existing site. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
Sitemap or Sitemaps for Magento and Wordpress?
I'm trying to figure out what to do with our sitemap situation. We have a magento install for our shopping cart
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chrishansen
sdhydroponics.com
and a wordpress install on
sdhydroponics.com/resources In Magento we get the XML sitemap manually by going to Catalog => Google Sitemap => Add Sitemap In wordpress we use Google XML sitemaps plugin. My questions are: Do I need both of these sitemaps? Or can I use one or the other? If I use both, do I make one sitemap1.xml and the other sitemap2.xml and drop them in the root? How do I make sure google knows I have 2 sitemaps? Anything else I should know? Thank You0 -
How do I fix the error duplicate page content and duplicate page title?
On my site www.millsheating.co.uk I have the error message as per the question title. The conflict is coming from these two pages which are effectively the same page: www.millsheating.co.uk www.millsheating.co.uk/index I have added a htaccess file to the root folder as I thought (hoped) it would fix the problem but I doesn't appear to have done so. this is the content of the htaccess file: Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^millsheating.co.uk RewriteRule (.*) http://www.millsheating.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.millsheating.co.uk/ [R=301,L] AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JasonHegarty0