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 Search console says 'sitemap is blocked by robots?
-
Google Search console is telling me "Sitemap contains URLs which are blocked by robots.txt."
I don't understand why my sitemap is being blocked? My robots.txt look like this:
User-Agent: *
Disallow:It's a WordPress site, with Yoast SEO installed. Is anyone else having this issue with Google Search console? Does anyone know how I can fix this issue?
-
Nice happy to hear that do you work with Greg Reindel? He is a good friend I looked at your IP that is why I ask?
Tom
-
I agree with David
Hey is your dev Greg Reindel? If so you can call me for help PM me here for my info.
Thomas Zickell
-
Hey guys, I ended up disabling the sitemap option from YoastSEO, then installed the 'Google (XML) sitemap' plug-in. I re-submitted the sitemap to Google last night, and it came back with no issues. I'm glad to finally have this sorted out.
Thanks for all the help!
-
Hi Christian,
The current robots.txt shouldn't be blocking those URLs.
Did you or someone else recently change the robots.txt file? If so, give Google a few days to re-crawl your site.
Also, can you check what happens when you do a fetch and render on one of the blocked posts in Search Console? Do you have issues there?
Cheers,
David
-
I think you need to make an https robots.txt file if you are running https if running https
https://moz.com/blog/xml-sitemaps
`User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php` Sitemap: https://domain.com/index-sitemap.xml
(that is a https site map)
can you send the sitemap URL or run it though deepcrawl
Hope this helps?
Did you make a new robots.txt file?
-
Thanks for the response. Do you think this is a robots.txt issue? Or could this be caused by the YoastSEO plugin?
Do you know if this plug-in works with YoastSEO together? Or will it cause issues?
-
Thank you for the response.
I just scanned the site using 'Screaming frog'. Under Internal>Directives there were zero 'no index' links. I also check for '404 errors', server 505 errors, or anything 'blocked by robots.txt'.
Google search console is still showing me that there are URL's being blocked by my sitemap. (I added a screenshot of this). When I click through, it tells me that the 'post sitemap' has over +300 warnings.
I have just deleted the YoastSEO plugin, and I am now re-installing it. hopefully, this fixes the issue.
-
No, you do not need to change or plug-in what is happening is Webmaster tools is telling you that you have no index or no follow were robots xTag somewhere on your URLs inside your sitemap.
Run your site through Moz, screaming frog Seo spider or deepcrawl and look for no indexed URLs.
webmaster tools/search console is telling you that you have no index URLs inside of your XML sitemap not that you robots.txt is blocking it. This would be set in the Yoast plugin. one way to correct it is to look for noindex URLs & filter them inside Yoast so they are not being presented to the crawlers.
If you would like you can turn off the sitemap on Yoast and turn it back on if that does not work I recommend completely removing the plug-in and reinstalling it
- https://kb.yoast.com/kb/how-can-i-uninstall-my-plugin/
- https://kinsta.com/blog/uninstall-wordpress-plugin/
Can you send a screenshot of what you're seeing?
When you see it in Google Webmaster tools are you talking about the XML sitemap itself mean no indexed because all XML sitemaps are no indexed.
Please add this to your robots.txt
`User-agent:* Disallow:/wp-admin/ Allow:/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php` Sitemap: http://www.website.com/sitemap_index.xml
I hope this is of help,
Tom
-
Hi,
Use this plugin
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-robots-txt/
it will remove previous robots.txt and set simple wordpress robots.txt and wait for a day
problem can be solved.
Also watch this video on the same @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZiyN07bbBM
Thanks
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
-
Role of Robots.txt and Search Console parameters settings
Hi, wondering if anyone can point me to resources or explain the difference between these two. If a site has url parameters disallowed in Robots.txt is it redundant to edit settings in Search Console parameters to anything other than "Let Googlebot Decide"?
Technical SEO | Sep 27, 2019, 11:21 AM | LivDetrick0 -
Spam URL'S in search results
We built a new website for a client. When I do 'site:clientswebsite.com' in Google it shows some of the real, recently submitted pages. But it also shows many pages of spam url results, like this 'clientswebsite.com/gockumamaso/22753.htm' - all of which then go to the sites 404 page. They have page titles and meta descriptions in Chinese or Japanese too. Some of the urls are of real pages, and link to the correct page, despite having the same Chinese page titles and descriptions in the SERPS. When I went to remove all the spammy urls in Search Console (it only allowed me to temporarily hide them), a whole load of new ones popped up in the SERPS after a day or two. The site files itself are all fine, with no errors in the server logs. All the usual stuff...robots.txt, sitemap etc seems ok and the proper pages have all been requested for indexing and are slowly appearing. The spammy ones continue though. What is going on and how can I fix it?
Technical SEO | Jun 24, 2017, 9:03 PM | Digital-Murph0 -
Abnormally high internal link reported in Google Search Console not matching Moz reports
If I'm looking at our internal link count and structure on Google Search Console, some pages are listed as having over a thousand internal links within our site. I've read that having too many internal links on a page devalues that page's PageRank, because the value is divided amongst the pages it links out to. Likewise, I've heard having too many internal links is just bad in general for SEO. Is that true? The problem I'm facing is determining how Google is "discovering" these internal links. If I'm just looking at one single page reported with, say, 1,350 links and I'm just looking at the code, it may only have 80 or 90 actual links. Moz will confirm this, as well. So why would Google Search Console report different? Should I be concerned about this?
Technical SEO | Jun 7, 2016, 1:29 PM | Closetstogo0 -
Is there a way for me to automatically download a website's sitemap.xml every month?
From now on we want to store all our sitemap.xml over the next years. Its a nice archive to have that allows us to analyse how many pages we have on our website and which ones were removed/redirected. Any suggestions? Thanks
Technical SEO | Aug 29, 2013, 7:44 PM | DeptAgency0 -
Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?
I realized we don't have a sitemap in place, so we're going to get one built. Once we do, I'll submit it manually to Google via Webmaster tools. However, we have a very dynamic site with content constantly being added. Will I need to keep manually re-submitting the sitemap to Google? Or could we have the continually updating sitemap live on our site at /sitemap and the crawlers will just pick it up from there? I noticed this is what SEOmoz does at http://www.seomoz.org/sitemap.
Technical SEO | Mar 13, 2012, 3:16 PM | askotzko0 -
How to generate a visual sitemap using sitemap.xml
Are there any tools (online preferably) which will take a sitemap.xml file and generate a visual site map? Seems like an obvious thing to do, but can't find any simple tools for this?
Technical SEO | Oct 18, 2017, 6:43 AM | k3nn3dy30 -
Should we use Google's crawl delay setting?
We’ve been noticing a huge uptick in Google’s spidering lately, and along with it a notable worsening of render times. Yesterday, for example, Google spidered our site at a rate of 30:1 (google spider vs. organic traffic.) So in other words, for every organic page request, Google hits the site 30 times. Our render times have lengthened to an avg. of 2 seconds (and up to 2.5 seconds). Before this renewed interest Google has taken in us we were seeing closer to one second average render times, and often half of that. A year ago, the ratio of Spider to Organic was between 6:1 and 10:1. Is requesting a crawl-delay from Googlebot a viable option? Our goal would be only to reduce Googlebot traffic, and hopefully improve render times and organic traffic. Thanks, Trisha
Technical SEO | Jul 15, 2011, 11:24 AM | lzhao0 -
Should I set up a disallow in the robots.txt for catalog search results?
When the crawl diagnostics came back for my site its showing around 3,000 pages of duplicate content. Almost all of them are of the catalog search results page. I also did a site search on Google and they have most of the results pages in their index too. I think I should just disallow the bots in the /catalogsearch/ sub folder, but I'm not sure if this will have any negative effect?
Technical SEO | May 6, 2011, 3:55 PM | JordanJudson0