Accidently blocked our site for an evening?
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Yesterday at about 5pm I switched our site to a new server and accidentally blocked our site from google for the evening. our domain is posnation.com and we are ranked in the top 3 in almost all pos related keywords. When i got in this morning i realized the mistake and went to google web tools and noticed the site was blocked so i went to fetch as google bot and corrected that. Now the message says:
Check to see that your robots.txt is working as expected. (Any changes you make to the robots.txt content below will not be saved.)
robots.txt file Downloaded Status
http://www.posnation.com/robots.txt 1 hours ago 200 (Success)When you go to google and type "pos systems" we are still #2 so i assume all is still ok. My question is will this potentially hurt our rankings and should i be worried and is there anything else I can do.
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If you have any sort of caching installed, you could try refreshing it and resubmitting the sitemap.
I checked your robots.txt file at http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml and it flagged the allow line. I don't think that would cause a problem, but you could try removing the "Allow: /" line and see if that helps.
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Hey Nick thanks for your response...i did the first part but the sitemap on resubmit of the sitemap.xmp it wont take due to this error
URL restricted by robots.txt
but my sitemap file is here http://posnation.com/sitemap.xml
and is not blocking it...any ideas on what to do next
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No you're ok. It used to be that if your site went down for even a few hours and the spiders came around that you could get deindexed. Now I guess they understand that stuff happens and you have a pretty long grace period before you get deindexed thankfully.
Good suggestions by Nick, also you can increase the googlebot crawl rate on your site in GWMT to get Google to come around again quicker.
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If it was just blocked overnight you should be OK. Site's do go down for extended periods of time occasionally and I would assume Google won't de-index based on a relatively short outage.
To be safe, or at least make yourself feel like you have done what you can - resubmit your xml sitemap in webmaster tools. Also go to the "Fetch as GoogleBot" section and fetch your home page. Once it is fetched, click on the submit link and tell it to submit the page and all linked pages. You are probably OK without doing that, but it couldn't hurt to resubmit.
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