Robots.txt gone wild
-
Hi guys, a site we manage, http://hhhhappy.com received an alert through web master tools yesterday that it can't be crawled. No changes were made to the site.
Don't know a huge amount about the robots.txt configuration expect that using Yoast by default it sets it not to crawl wp admin folder and nothing else. I checked this against all other sites and the settings are the same. And yet 12 hours later after the issue Happy is still not being crawled and meta data is not showing in search results. Any ideas what may have triggered this?
-
Hi Radi!
Have Matt and/or Martijn answered your question? If so, please mark one or both of their responses "Good Answer."
Otherwise, what's still tripping you up?
-
Have you checked the downtime of the site recently? Sometimes it could be that Google isn't able to reach your robots.txt file and because of that they'll stop crawling your site temporarily.
-
Are you getting the message in Search Console that there were errors crawling your page?
This typically means that your host was temporarily down when Google landed on your page. These types of things happen all the time and are no big deal.
Your homepage cache shows a crawl date of today so I'm assuming things are working properly ... if you really want to find out, try doing a "Fetch" of your site in Search Console.
Crawl > Fetch as Google > Fetch (big red button)
You should get a status of "Complete." If you get anything else there should be an error message with it. If so, paste that here.
I have checked the site headers, cache, crawlability with Screaming Frog, and everything is fine. This seems like one of those temporary messages but if the problem persists definitely let us know!
-
Our host has just offered this response which does not get me any closer:
Hi Radi,
It looks like your site has its own robots.txt file, which is not blocking any user agents. The only thing it's doing is blocking bots from indexing your admin area:
<code>User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/</code>
This is a standard robots.txt file, and you shouldn't be having any issues with Google indexing your site from a hosting standpoint. To test this, I curled the site as Googlebot and received a 200OK response:
<code>curl -A "Googlebot/2.1" -IL [hhhhappy.com](http://hhhhappy.com) HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2016 22:17:26 GMT Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Connection: keep-alive Set-Cookie: __cfduid=d3177a1baa04623fb2573870f1d4b4bac1457216246; expires=Sun, 05-Mar-17 22:17:26 GMT; path=/; domain=.[hhhhappy.com](http://hhhhappy.com); HttpOnly X-Cacheable: bot Cache-Control: max-age=10800, must-revalidate X-Cache: HIT: 17 X-Cache-Group: bot X-Pingback: [http://hhhhappy.com/xmlrpc.php](http://hhhhappy.com/xmlrpc.php) Link: <[http://hhhhappy.com/](http://hhhhappy.com/)>; rel=shortlink Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT X-Type: default X-Pass-Why: Set-Cookie: X-Mapping-fjhppofk=2C42B261F74DA203D392B5EC5BF07833; path=/ Server: cloudflare-nginx CF-RAY: 27f0f02445920f09-IAD</code>
I didn't see any plugins on your site that looked like they would overwrite robots.txt, but I urge you to take another look at them, and then dive into your site's settings for the meta value that Googlebot would pick up. Everything on our end seems to be giving the green light.
Please let us know if you have any other questions or issues in the meantime.
Cheers,
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
-
Scary bug in search console: All our pages reported as being blocked by robots.txt after https migration
We just migrated to https and created 2 days ago a new property in search console for the https domain. Webmaster Tools account for the https domain now shows for every page in our sitemap the warning: "Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt."Also in the dashboard of the search console it shows a red triangle with warning that our root domain would be blocked by robots.txt. 1) When I test the URLs in search console robots.txt test tool all looks fine.2) When I fetch as google and render the page it renders and indexes without problem (would not if it was really blocked in robots.txt)3) We temporarily completely emptied the robots.txt, submitted it in search console and uploaded sitemap again and same warnings even though no robots.txt was online4) We run screaming frog crawl on whole website and it indicates that there is no page blocked by robots.txt5) We carefully revised the whole robots.txt and it does not contain any row that blocks relevant content on our site or our root domain. (same robots.txt was online for last decade in http version without problem)6) In big webmaster tools I could upload the sitemap and so far no error reported.7) we resubmitted sitemaps and same issue8) I see our root domain already with https in google SERPThe site is https://www.languagecourse.netSince the site has significant traffic, if google would really interpret for any reason that our site is blocked by robots we will be in serious trouble.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
This is really scary, so even if it is just a bug in search console and does not affect crawling of the site, it would be great if someone from google could have a look into the reason for this since for a site owner this really can increase cortisol to unhealthy levels.Anybody ever experienced the same problem?Anybody has an idea where we could report/post this issue?0 -
Robots.txt Allowed
Hello all, We want to block something that has the following at the end: http://www.domain.com/category/product/some+demo+-text-+example--writing+here So I was wondering if doing: /*example--writing+here would work?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
How to make Google index your site? (Blocked with robots.txt for a long time)
The problem is the for the long time we had a website m.imones.lt but it was blocked with robots.txt.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FCRMediaLietuva
But after a long time we want Google to index it. We unblocked it 1 week or 8 days ago. But Google still does not recognize it. I type site:m.imones.lt and it says it is still blocked with robots.txt What should be the process to make Google crawl this mobile version faster? Thanks!0 -
Using Meta Header vs Robots.txt
Hey Mozzers, I am working on a site that has search-friendly parameters for their faceted navigation, however this makes it difficult to identify the parameters in a robots.txt file. I know that using the robots.txt file is highly recommended and powerful, but I am not sure how to do this when facets are using common words such as sizes. For example, a filtered url may look like www.website.com/category/brand/small.html Brand and size are both facets. Brand is a great filter, and size is very relevant for shoppers, but many products include "small" in the url, so it is tough to isolate that filter in the robots.txt. (I hope that makes sense). I am able to identify problematic pages and edit the Meta Head so I can add on any page that is causing these duplicate issues. My question is, is this a good idea? I want bots to crawl the facets, but indexing all of the facets causes duplicate issues. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | evan890 -
Robots.txt, does it need preceding directory structure?
Do you need the entire preceding path in robots.txt for it to match? e.g: I know if i add Disallow: /fish to robots.txt it will block /fish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Milian
/fish.html
/fish/salmon.html
/fishheads
/fishheads/yummy.html
/fish.php?id=anything But would it block?: en/fish
en/fish.html
en/fish/salmon.html
en/fishheads
en/fishheads/yummy.html
**en/fish.php?id=anything (taken from Robots.txt Specifications)** I'm hoping it actually wont match, that way writing this particular robots.txt will be much easier! As basically I'm wanting to block many URL that have BTS- in such as: http://www.example.com/BTS-something
http://www.example.com/BTS-somethingelse
http://www.example.com/BTS-thingybob But have other pages that I do not want blocked, in subfolders that also have BTS- in, such as: http://www.example.com/somesubfolder/BTS-thingy
http://www.example.com/anothersubfolder/BTS-otherthingy Thanks for listening0 -
Robots Disallow Backslash - Is it right command
Bit skeptical, as due to dynamic url and some other linkage issue, google has crawled url with backslash and asterisk character ex - www.xyz.com/\/index.php?option=com_product www.xyz.com/\"/index.php?option=com_product Now %5c is the encoded version of \ - backslash & %22 is encoded version of asterisk Need to know for command :- User-agent: * Disallow: \As am disallowing all backslash url through this - will it only remove the backslash url which are duplicates or the entire site,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Old pages still crawled by SE returning 404s. Better to put 301 or block with robots.txt ?
Hello guys, A client of ours has thousand of pages returning 404 visibile on googl webmaster tools. These are all old pages which don't exist anymore but Google keeps on detecting them. These pages belong to sections of the site which don't exist anymore. They are not linked externally and didn't provide much value even when they existed What do u suggest us to do: (a) do nothing (b) redirect all these URL/folders to the homepage through a 301 (c) block these pages through the robots.txt. Are we inappropriately using part of the crawling budget set by Search Engines by not doing anything ? thx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | H-FARM0 -
Should we block urls like this - domainname/shop/leather-chairs.html?brand=244&cat=16&dir=ascℴ=price&price=1 within the robots.txt?
I've recently added a campaign within the SEOmoz interface and received an alarming number of errors ~9,000 on our eCommerce website. This site was built in Magento, and we are using search friendly url's however most of our errors were duplicate content / titles due to url's like: domainname/shop/leather-chairs.html?brand=244&cat=16&dir=asc&order=price&price=1 and domainname/shop/leather-chairs.html?brand=244&cat=16&dir=asc&order=price&price=4. Is this hurting us in the search engines? Is rogerbot too good? What can we do to cut off bots after the ".html?" ? Any help would be much appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280