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.
Oh no googlebot can not access my robots.txt file
-
I just receive a n error message from google webmaster
Wonder it was something to do with Yoast plugin.
Could somebody help me with troubleshooting this?
Here's original message
Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 189 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site's overall robots.txt error rate is 100.0%.
Recommended action
If the site error rate is 100%:
- Using a web browser, attempt to access http://www.soobumimphotography.com//robots.txt. If you are able to access it from your browser, then your site may be configured to deny access to googlebot. Check the configuration of your firewall and site to ensure that you are not denying access to googlebot.
- If your robots.txt is a static page, verify that your web service has proper permissions to access the file.
- If your robots.txt is dynamically generated, verify that the scripts that generate the robots.txt are properly configured and have permission to run. Check the logs for your website to see if your scripts are failing, and if so attempt to diagnose the cause of the failure.
If the site error rate is less than 100%:
- Using Webmaster Tools, find a day with a high error rate and examine the logs for your web server for that day. Look for errors accessing robots.txt in the logs for that day and fix the causes of those errors.
- The most likely explanation is that your site is overloaded. Contact your hosting provider and discuss reconfiguring your web server or adding more resources to your website.
After you think you've fixed the problem, use Fetch as Google to fetch http://www.soobumimphotography.com//robots.txt to verify that Googlebot can properly access your site.
-
I can open text file but Godaddy told me robots.txt file is not on my server (root level).
Also told me that my site is not crawled because robot.txt file is not there.
Basically all of those might have resulted from plug in I was using (term optimizer)
Based on what Godaddy told me, my .htaccess file was crashed because of that and had to be recreated. So now .htaceess file is good.
Now I have to figure out is why my site is not accessible from Googlebot.
Let me know Keith if this is a quick fix or need some time to troubleshoot. You can send me a message to discuss about fees if nessary.
Thanks again
-
Hi,
You have a robots.txt file here: http://www.soobumimphotography.com/robots.txt
Can you write this again in English so it makes sense?
"I called Godaddy and told me if I used any plug ins etc. Godaddy fixed .htaccss file and my site was up and runningjust fine."
Yes google xml sitemaps will add the location of your stitemap to the robots.txt file - but there is nothing wrong with your robots.txt file.
-
I just called Godaddy and told me that I don't have robots.txt tile. Can anyone help with this issue?
So here's what happen:
I purchased Joos de Vailk's Term Optimizer to consolidate tags etc.
As soon as I installed & opened it, my site crashed.
I called Godaddy and told me if I used any plug ins etc. Godaddy fixed .htaccss file and my site was up and runningjust fine.
Isn't plugin like the Google XML Sitemaps automatically generates robots.txt file?
-
Yes, my site was down.
-
I had a .htaccess issue past 24 hour with plug in and Godaddy had fixed it for me.
I think this caused problem.
I just fetched again and still getting unreachable page. I wonder if I have bad .htaccess file
-
Was your site down during this period?
I would recommend setting up pingdom.com (free site monitoring), this will email you if your site goes down - I suspect this is a hosting related issue.
FYI, I can access your robots.txt fine from here.
-
Hi Bistoss, You should log into Google Webmaster Tools to check the day the problem occurred. It is not uncommon for host to have problems that temporarily cause access problems. In some rare cases Google itself could be having problems. For example, in July we had 1 day with a 11% failure rate, it was the host. Since then no problems. If your problems are persistent, then you may have an issue like this: http://blog.jitbit.com/2012/08/fixing-googlebot-cant-access-your-site.html old Analytic code. Other things to look at is any recent changes, specifically anything that had to do with .htaccess Be sure to use the FETCH AS GOOGLE bot after any changes to verify that Google can now crawl your site. Hope this helps
-
I also use Robots Meta Configuration plug in
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
-
Crawl solutions for landing pages that don't contain a robots.txt file?
My site (www.nomader.com) is currently built on Instapage, which does not offer the ability to add a robots.txt file. I plan to migrate to a Shopify site in the coming months, but for now the Instapage site is my primary website. In the interim, would you suggest that I manually request a Google crawl through the search console tool? If so, how often? Any other suggestions for countering this Meta Noindex issue?
Technical SEO | | Nomader1 -
Disallow wildcard match in Robots.txt
This is in my robots.txt file, does anyone know what this is supposed to accomplish, it doesn't appear to be blocking URLs with question marks Disallow: /?crawler=1
Technical SEO | | AmandaBridge
Disallow: /?mobile=1 Thank you0 -
One robots.txt file for multiple sites?
I have 2 sites hosted with Blue Host and was told to put the robots.txt in the root folder and just use the one robots.txt for both sites. Is this right? It seems wrong. I want to block certain things on one site. Thanks for the help, Rena
Technical SEO | | renalynd270 -
Good robots txt for magento
Dear Communtiy, I am trying to improve the SEO ratings for my website www.rijwielcashencarry.nl (magento). My next step will be implementing robots txt to exclude some crawling pages.
Technical SEO | | rijwielcashencarry040
Does anybody have a good magento robots txt for me? And what need i copy exactly? Thanks everybody! Greetings, Bob0 -
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 -
Can too many pages hurt crawling and ranking?
Hi, I work for local yellow pages in Belgium, over the last months we introduced a succesfull technique to boost SEO traffic: we have created over 150k of new pages, all targeting specific keywords and all containing unique content, a site architecture to enable google to find these pages through crawling, xml sitemaps, .... All signs (traffic, indexation of xml sitemaps, rankings, ...) are positive. So far so good. We are able to quickly build more unique pages, and I wonder how google will react to this type of "large scale operation": can it hurt crawling and ranking if google notices big volumes of content (unique content)? Please advice
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories0 -
Subdomain Removal in Robots.txt with Conditional Logic??
I would like to see if there is a way to add conditional logic to the robots.txt file so that when we push from DEV to PRODUCTION and the robots.txt file is pushed, we don't have to remember to NOT push the robots.txt file OR edit it when it goes live. My specific situation is this: I have www.website.com, dev.website.com and new.website.com and somehow google has indexed the DEV.website.com and NEW.website.com and I'd like these to be removed from google's index as they are causing duplicate content. Should I: a) add 2 new GWT entries for DEV.website.com and NEW.website.com and VERIFY ownership - if I do this, then when the files are pushed to LIVE won't the files contain the VERIFY META CODE for the DEV version even though it's now LIVE? (hope that makes sense) b) write a robots.txt file that specifies "DISALLOW: DEV.website.com/" is that possible? I have only seen examples of DISALLOW with a "/" in the beginning... Hope this makes sense, can really use the help! I'm on a Windows Server 2008 box running ColdFusion websites.
Technical SEO | | ErnieB0 -
Can hidden backlinks ever be ok?
Hi all, I'm very new to SEO and still learning a lot. Is it considered a black hat tactic to wrap a link in a DIV tag, with display set to none (hidden div), and what can the repercussions be? From what I've learnt so far, is that this is a very unethical thing to be doing, and that the site hosting these links can end up being removed from Google/Bing/etc indexes completely. Is this true? The site hosting these links is a group/parent site for a brand, and each hidden link points to one of the child sites (similar sites, but different companies in different areas). Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | gemcomp1230