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.xmlI 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
-
Errors In Search Console
Hi All, I am hoping someone might be able to help with this. Last week one of my sites dropped from mid first day to bottom of page 1. We had not been link building as such and it only seems to of affected a single search term and the ranking page (which happens to be the home page). When I was going through everything I went to search console and in crawl errors there are 2 errors that showed up as detected 3 days before the drop. These are: wp-admin/admin-ajax.php showing as response code 400 and also xmlrpc.php showing as response code 405 robots.txt is as follows: user-agent: * disallow: /wp-admin/ allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php Any help with what is wrong here and how to fix it would be greatly appreciated. Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | DaleZon0 -
Robot.txt : How to block a specific file type in several subdirectories ?
Hello everyone ! I need help setting up a robot.txt. I'm trying to block all pdf files in particular directories so I'm using this command. In the example below the line is blocking all .gif in the entire site. Block files of a specific file type (for example, .gif) | Disallow: /*.gif$ 2 questions : Can I use this command to specify one particular directory in which I want to block pdf files ? Will this line be recognized by googlebots ? Disallow: /fileadmin/xxxxxxx/xxx/xxxxxxx/*.pdf$ Then I realized that I would have to write as many lines as many directories there are in which I want to block pdf files. Let's say I want to block pdf files in all these 3 directories /fileadmin/directory1 /fileadmin/directory1/sub1 /fileadmin/directory1/sub1/pdf Is there a pattern-matching rule I could use to blocks access to pdf files in all subdirectories instead of writing 3x the above line for each subdirectory ? For exemple : Disallow: /fileadmin/directory1*/ Many thanks in advance for any insight you may have.
Technical SEO | | LabeliumUSA0 -
Discrepancy in actual indexed pages vs search console
Hi support, I checked my search console. It said that 8344 pages from www.printcious.com/au/sitemap.xml are indexed by google. however, if i search for site:www.printcious.com/au it only returned me 79 results. See http://imgur.com/a/FUOY2 https://www.google.com/search?num=100&safe=off&biw=1366&bih=638&q=site%3Awww.printcious.com%2Fau&oq=site%3Awww.printcious.com%2Fau&gs_l=serp.3...109843.110225.0.110430.4.4.0.0.0.0.102.275.1j2.3.0....0...1c.1.64.serp..1.0.0.htlbSGrS8p8 Could you please advise why there is discrepancy? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Printcious0 -
Robots.txt & meta noindex--site still shows up on Google Search
I have set up my robots.txt like this: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock
Disallow: / and I have this meta tag in my on a Wordpress site, set up with SEO Yoast name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/> I did "Fetch as Google" on my Google Search Console My website is still showing up in the search results and it says this: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt" This site has not shown up for years and now it is ranking above my site that I want to rank for this keyword. How do I get Google to ignore this site? This seems really weird and I'm confused how a site with little content, that has not been updated for years can rank higher than a site that is constantly updated and improved.1 -
2 sitemaps on my robots.txt?
Hi, I thought that I just could link one sitemap from my site's robots.txt but... I may be wrong. So, I need to confirm if this kind of implementation is right or wrong: robots.txt for Magento Community and Enterprise ...
Technical SEO | | Webicultors
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.es/media/sitemap/es.xml
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.pt/media/sitemap/pt.xml Thanks in advance,0 -
Blocked jquery in Robots.txt, Any SEO impact?
I've heard that Google is now indexing links and stuff available in javascript and jquery. My webmastertools is showing that some links are blocked in robots.txt of jquery. Sorry I'm not a developer or designer. I want to know is there any impact of this on my SEO? and also how can I unblock it for the robots? Check this screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/3VDWikC.png
Technical SEO | | hammadrafique0 -
Google indexing despite robots.txt block
Hi This subdomain has about 4'000 URLs indexed in Google, although it's blocked via robots.txt: https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=site%3Awww1.swisscom.ch&oq=site%3Awww1.swisscom.ch This has been the case for almost a year now, and it does not look like Google tends to respect the blocking in http://www1.swisscom.ch/robots.txt Any clues why this is or what I could do to resolve it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | zeepartner0 -
How often should I upload a new sitemap in google webmasters?
So I have a real estate website that is regularly changing listings, photos, data. Every time a new listing is added it creates a page for that listing. My question is how frequently should I be recreating a new xml sitemap and uploading it to google webmasters? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | jackaveli0