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.
Robots.txt file getting a 500 error - is this a problem?
-
Hello all!
While doing some routine health checks on a few of our client sites, I spotted that a new client of ours - who's website was not designed built by us - is returning a 500 internal server error when I try to look at the robots.txt file.
As we don't host / maintain their site, I would have to go through their head office to get this changed, which isn't a problem but I just wanted to check whether this error will actually be having a negative effect on their site / whether there's a benefit to getting this changed?
Thanks in advance!
-
Hi Barry,
Thanks for your swift response on this. The pages certainly seem to be getting cached correctly, and when we initially took over the SEO and made wholesale changes to the site, there were huge improvements, so it looks for all the world like the main pages at least are being looked at.
But I think you make a good point about getting it solved anyway so we can identify any problems that may be occurring / will occur later.
-
robots.txt isn't a requirement, indeed it's only voluntarily followed by spiders (as in they can choose to ignore it), so I think you'll be fine without it. The default is to 'allow all' and 'follow, index', so they should still be crawling the site correctly.
Check in Webmaster tools by fetching as Googlebot or alternative find a page and put cache:pageurl.html into google and see if it's cached it correctly.
That said returning a 500 instead of a 404 may be causing an issue that isn't obviously apparent and 500 is a bit too generic a message to say specifically what, but I would try and solve it as quick as possible. The benefits will depends on what you put in your robots.txt file
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
-
Subdomain 403 error
Hi Everyone, A crawler from our SEO tool detects a 403 error from a link from our main domain to a a couple of subdomains. However, these subdomains are perfect accessibly. What could be the problem? Is this error caused by the server, the crawlbot or something else? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Technical SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE
Jens0 -
Robots.txt in subfolders and hreflang issues
A client recently rolled out their UK business to the US. They decided to deploy with 2 WordPress installations: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/uk/ - robots.txt location: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/uk/robots.txt
Technical SEO | | lauralou82
US site - https://www.clientname.com/us/ - robots.txt location: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/us/robots.txt We've had various issues with /us/ pages being indexed in Google UK, and /uk/ pages being indexed in Google US. They have the following hreflang tags across all pages: We changed the x-default page to .com 2 weeks ago (we've tried both /uk/ and /us/ previously). Search Console says there are no hreflang tags at all. Additionally, we have a robots.txt file on each site which has a link to the corresponding sitemap files, but when viewing the robots.txt tester on Search Console, each property shows the robots.txt file for https://www.clientname.com only, even though when you actually navigate to this URL (https://www.clientname.com/robots.txt) you’ll get redirected to either https://www.clientname.com/uk/robots.txt or https://www.clientname.com/us/robots.txt depending on your location. Any suggestions how we can remove UK listings from Google US and vice versa?0 -
Is sitemap required on my robots.txt?
Hi, I know that linking your sitemap from your robots.txt file is a good practice. Ok, but... may I just send my sitemap to search console and forget about adding ti to my robots.txt? That's my situation: 1 multilang platform which means... ... 2 set of pages. One for each lang, of course But my CMS (magento) only allows me to have 1 robots.txt file So, again: may I have a robots.txt file woth no sitemap AND not suffering any potential SEO loss? Thanks in advance, Juan Vicente Mañanas Abad
Technical SEO | | Webicultors0 -
How big is the problem: 404-errors as result of out of stock products?
We had a discussion about the importance of 404-errors as result of products which are out of stock. Of course this is not good, but what is the leverance in terms of importance: low-medium-high?
Technical SEO | | Digital-DMG0 -
Will an XML sitemap override a robots.txt
I have a client that has a robots.txt file that is blocking an entire subdomain, entirely by accident. Their original solution, not realizing the robots.txt error, was to submit an xml sitemap to get their pages indexed. I did not think this tactic would work, as the robots.txt would take precedent over the xmls sitemap. But it worked... I have no explanation as to how or why. Does anyone have an answer to this? or any experience with a website that has had a clear Disallow: / for months , that somehow has pages in the index?
Technical SEO | | KCBackofen0 -
How do I get out of google bomb?
Hi all, I have a website named bijouxroom.com; and I was in the 7th page for the search term takı in google; and 2nd page for online takı. Now, I see that in one day my results seem to be on the 13th and 10th page in google respectively. I made too much anchor text for takı and online takı. What shall I do to gain my positions back? Thanks in advance. Regards,
Technical SEO | | ozererim0 -
500 Server Error on RSS Feed
Hi there, I am getting multiple 500 errors on my RSS feed. Here is the error: <dt>Title</dt> <dd>500 : Error</dd> <dt>Meta Description</dt> <dd>Traceback (most recent call last): File "build/bdist.linux-x86_64/egg/downpour/init.py", line 391, in _error failure.raiseException() File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/twisted/python/failure.py", line 370, in raiseException raise self.type, self.value, self.tb Error: 500 Internal Server Error</dd> <dt>Meta Robots</dt> <dd>Not present/empty</dd> <dt>Meta Refresh</dt> <dd>Not present/empty</dd> Any ideas as to why this is happening, they are valid feeds?
Technical SEO | | mistat20000 -
Does Bing ignore robots txt files?
Bonjour from "Its a miracle is not raining" Wetherby Uk 🙂 Ok here goes... Why despite a robots text file excluding indexing to site http://lewispr.netconstruct-preview.co.uk/ is the site url being indexed in Bing bit not Google? Does bing ignore robots text files or is there something missing from http://lewispr.netconstruct-preview.co.uk/robots.txt I need to add to stop bing indexing a preview site as illustrated below. http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/preview-bing-indexed.jpg Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0