Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Google insists robots.txt is blocking... but it isn't.
-
I recently launched a new website. During development, I'd enabled the option in WordPress to prevent search engines from indexing the site.
When the site went public (over 24 hours ago), I cleared that option. At that point, I added a specific robots.txt file that only disallowed a couple directories of files. You can view the robots.txt at http://photogeardeals.com/robots.txt
Google (via Webmaster tools) is insisting that my robots.txt file contains a "Disallow: /" on line 2 and that it's preventing Google from indexing the site and preventing me from submitting a sitemap. These errors are showing both in the sitemap section of Webmaster tools as well as the Blocked URLs section.
Bing's webmaster tools are able to read the site and sitemap just fine.
Any idea why Google insists I'm disallowing everything even after telling it to re-fetch?
-
Hi Aaron - You have a couple of solid answers here. Has your issue been resolved in GWT?
-
24 hours is a short time and probably google did not reindex or even looked at your new robot.txt
Webmaster tools is way slower than bing tools, so be patient.
As a rule of thumb, I wait at least a week with google before worrying (my 2 cents)
-
Hi Aaron,
I identify with your frustration, but want to lead my response with the caveat that I am not a developer so there may be people here with much more technical SEO expertise than me who might have a better answer.
What I do know id that Google Webmaster Tools data is not real time and can often take days to weeks to update. It could be that the reason GWT is showing something different about your robots.txt file is because it's old information that hasn't updated yet.
When I looked at your robots.txt file, I found two sitemaps, one with 2 URLs and one with 8 URLs. This is pretty tiny. Even in the old days, conventional wisdom was that it took at least 20 content pages in order for Google to take note and index the site.
Have you tried posting the URLs of your new site on Google+? I have heard that this is a great indexing tool in addition to the Fetch as Googlebot in GWT. Just a thought!
You know, there was a time when it took 6-8 weeks for a new site to get indexed. Google has definitely sped up to the point where I think we are all expecting instant results and sometimes that just doesn't happen.
I think this just might be a matter of patience. However, I am always willing to admit that I could be wrong and am interested to know what others think!
Dana
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
-
Robots.txt allows wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Hello, Mozzers!
Technical SEO | | AndyKubrin
I noticed something peculiar in the robots.txt used by one of my clients: Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php What would be the purpose of allowing a search engine to crawl this file?
Is it OK? Should I do something about it?
Everything else on /wp-admin/ is disallowed.
Thanks in advance for your help.
-AK:2 -
My Homepage Won't Load if Javascript is Disabled. Is this an SEO/Indexation issue?
Hi everyone, I'm working with a client who recently had their site redesigned. I'm just going through to do an initial audit to make sure everything looks good. Part of my initial indexation audit goes through questions about how the site functions when you disable, javascript, cookies, and/or css. I use the Web Developer extension for Chrome to do this. I know, more recently, people have said that content loaded by Javascript will be indexed. I just want to make sure it's not hurting my clients SEO. http://americasinstantsigns.com/ Is it as simple as looking at Google's Cached URL? The URL is definitely being indexed and when looking at the text-only version everything appears to be in order. This may be an outdated question, but I just want to be sure! Thank you so much!
Technical SEO | | ccox10 -
Finding websites that don't have meta descriptions
Hi everyone, as a way to find new business leads I thought about targeting websites that have poor meta descriptions or where they are simply missing. A quick look at SERPs shows this is still a major issue for many businesses. Is there any way I can quickly find pages for which meta description is lacking? Thank you! Best regards, Florian
Technical SEO | | agencepicnic0 -
Should I block Map pages with robots.txt?
Hello, I have a website that was started in 1999. On the website I have map pages for each of the offices listed on my site, for which there are about 120. Each of the 120 maps is in a whole separate html page. There is no content in the page other than the map. I know all of the offices love having the map pages so I don't want to remove the pages. So, my question is would these pages with no real content be hurting the rankings of the other pages on our site? Therefore, should I block the pages with my robots.txt? Would I also have to remove these pages (in webmaster tools?) from Google for blocking by robots.txt to really work? I appreciate your feedback, thanks!
Technical SEO | | imaginex0 -
Will blocking the Wayback Machine (archive.org) have any impact on Google crawl and indexing/SEO?
Will blocking the Wayback Machine (archive.org) by adding the code they give have any impact on Google crawl and indexing/SEO? Anyone know? Thanks! ~Brett
Technical SEO | | BBuck0 -
Best way to handle pages with iframes that I don't want indexed? Noindex in the header?
I am doing a bit of SEO work for a friend, and the situation is the following: The site is a place to discuss articles on the web. When clicking on a link that has been posted, it sends the user to a URL on the main site that is URL.com/article/view. This page has a large iframe that contains the article itself, and a small bar at the top containing the article with various links to get back to the original site. I'd like to make sure that the comment pages (URL.com/article) are indexed instead of all of the URL.com/article/view pages, which won't really do much for SEO. However, all of these pages are indexed. What would be the best approach to make sure the iframe pages aren't indexed? My intuition is to just have a "noindex" in the header of those pages, and just make sure that the conversation pages themselves are properly linked throughout the site, so that they get indexed properly. Does this seem right? Thanks for the help...
Technical SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Will an XML sitemap override a robots.txt
I have a client that has a robots.txt file that is blocking an entire subdomain, entirely by accident. Their original solution, not realizing the robots.txt error, was to submit an xml sitemap to get their pages indexed. I did not think this tactic would work, as the robots.txt would take precedent over the xmls sitemap. But it worked... I have no explanation as to how or why. Does anyone have an answer to this? or any experience with a website that has had a clear Disallow: / for months , that somehow has pages in the index?
Technical SEO | | KCBackofen0 -
Robots.txt to disallow /index.php/ path
Hi SEOmoz, I have a problem with my Joomla site (yeah - me too!). I get a large amount of /index.php/ urls despite using a program to handle these issues. The URLs cause indexation errors with google (404). Now, I fixed this issue once before, but the problem persist. So I thought, instead of wasting more time, couldnt I just disallow all paths containing /index.php/ ?. I don't use that extension, but would it cause me any problems from an SEO perspective? How do I disallow all index.php's? Is it a simple: Disallow: /index.php/
Technical SEO | | Mikkehl0
