WEbsite cannot be crawled
-
I have received the following message from MOZ on a few of our websites now
Our crawler was not able to access the robots.txt file on your site. This often occurs because of a server error from the robots.txt. Although this may have been caused by a temporary outage, we recommend making sure your robots.txt file is accessible and that your network and server are working correctly. Typically errors like this should be investigated and fixed by the site webmaster.
I have spoken with our webmaster and they have advised the below:
The Robots.txt file is definitely there on all pages and Google is able to crawl for these files. Moz however is having some difficulty with finding the files when there is a particular redirect in place.
For example, the page currently redirects from threecounties.co.uk/ to https://www.threecounties.co.uk/ and when this happens, the Moz crawler cannot find the robots.txt on the first URL and this generates the reports you have been receiving. From what I understand, this is a flaw with the Moz software and not something that we could fix form our end.
_Going forward, something we could do is remove these rewrite rules to www., but these are useful redirects and removing them would likely have SEO implications. _
Has anyone else had this issue and is there anything we can do to rectify, or should we leave as is?
-
Ok, I made a quick test of your robot.txt file and looks fine,
https://www.threecounties.co.uk/robots.txtThen I made a test https://httpstatus.io/ to check the status code
of your robot.txt file and show me 200 status code (So it's fine)Also, you need to make sure that your robot.txt file is accessible for the Rogerbot (Moz crawler)
This day the hosting providers have become very strict with third-party crawlers
This includes Moz, Majestic SEO, Semrush and Ahrefs.Here you can find all the possible sources of the problem and recommended solutions
https://moz.com/help/guides/moz-pro-overview/site-crawl/unable-to-crawlRegards
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
-
Page Authority and Google updates favouring websites with black hat practices ?
Can someone explain how is it that most of the competitors I have online and that rank in first page of the search results almost entirely get links ( in the thousands) and still have higher or equal domain/page authority than mine? I went 1 by 1 checking all their links and they mostly come from sex pages, and non related sites. I say stop creating angry pandas and penguins and start taking out of the game people that just play dirty. Thanks.
Moz Pro | | AbellSEO0 -
Still Cant Crawl My Site
I've removed all blocks but two from our htaccess. They are for amazonaws.com to block amazon from crawling us. I did a fetch as google in our WM tools on our robots txt with success. SEOMoz crawler here hit's our site and gets a 403. I've looks in our blocked request logs and amazon is the only one in there. What is going on here?
Moz Pro | | martJ0 -
Crawl Stats Have Dissapeared
Hi SEOmoz I received an email today that another scan has been performed but when I log into my account all the tracking details have disappeared? States Pages crawled N/A. Can someone please help? Temporary problem? Website www.vintageheirloom.com Thanks
Moz Pro | | well-its-1-louder0 -
Crawl Diagnostics returning duplicate content based on session id
I'm just starting to dig into crawl diagnostics and it is returning quite a few errors. Primarily, the crawl is indicating duplicate content (page titles, meta tags, etc), because of a session id in the URL. I have set-up a URL parameter in Google Webmaster Tools to help Google recognize the existence of this session id. Is there any way to tell the SEOMoz spider the same thing? I'd like to get rid of these errors since I've already handled them for the most part.
Moz Pro | | csingsaas0 -
How long does it typically take MOZBOT to crawl a site?
Our site has had "crawl in progress" for over 24 hours now without an update, we're dying for the results since our last changes :).
Moz Pro | | absoauto0 -
Crawl Diagnostics Summary
Sorry if I am not asking in the right place. On Crawl Diagnostics Summary it says this right..?? : "To get you started quickly Roger is crawling up to 250 pages on your site. You should see these results within two hours. The full crawl will complete within 7 days.". so it's passed a day and it still doesn't show nothing. It says "Processing Crawl Data for 358 pages" How much should i wait??
Moz Pro | | Dussk0 -
Crawl frequency
What is the frequency of crawl. My crawl diagnostics shows data from over a month ago
Moz Pro | | deBreezeInteractive0 -
SEOmoz crawl diagnostics report - what are the duplicate pages urls?
I just see the number of duplicates but not what the urls of the duplicates are? I don't see it in the export either, but maybe I'm missing it Cheers S
Moz Pro | | firstconversion0