Oh no googlebot can not access my robots.txt file

[BistosAmerica]

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.

[BistosAmerica]

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

[SEOKeith]

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.

[BistosAmerica]

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?

[BistosAmerica]

Yes, my site was down.

[BistosAmerica]

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

[SEOKeith]

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.

[donford]

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

[BistosAmerica]

I also use Robots Meta Configuration plug in