Google insists robots.txt is blocking... but it isn't.
-
I recently launched a new website. During development, I'd enabled the option in WordPress to prevent search engines from indexing the site.
When the site went public (over 24 hours ago), I cleared that option. At that point, I added a specific robots.txt file that only disallowed a couple directories of files. You can view the robots.txt at http://photogeardeals.com/robots.txt
Google (via Webmaster tools) is insisting that my robots.txt file contains a "Disallow: /" on line 2 and that it's preventing Google from indexing the site and preventing me from submitting a sitemap. These errors are showing both in the sitemap section of Webmaster tools as well as the Blocked URLs section.
Bing's webmaster tools are able to read the site and sitemap just fine.
Any idea why Google insists I'm disallowing everything even after telling it to re-fetch?
-
Hi Aaron - You have a couple of solid answers here. Has your issue been resolved in GWT?
-
24 hours is a short time and probably google did not reindex or even looked at your new robot.txt
Webmaster tools is way slower than bing tools, so be patient.
As a rule of thumb, I wait at least a week with google before worrying (my 2 cents)
-
Hi Aaron,
I identify with your frustration, but want to lead my response with the caveat that I am not a developer so there may be people here with much more technical SEO expertise than me who might have a better answer.
What I do know id that Google Webmaster Tools data is not real time and can often take days to weeks to update. It could be that the reason GWT is showing something different about your robots.txt file is because it's old information that hasn't updated yet.
When I looked at your robots.txt file, I found two sitemaps, one with 2 URLs and one with 8 URLs. This is pretty tiny. Even in the old days, conventional wisdom was that it took at least 20 content pages in order for Google to take note and index the site.
Have you tried posting the URLs of your new site on Google+? I have heard that this is a great indexing tool in addition to the Fetch as Googlebot in GWT. Just a thought!
You know, there was a time when it took 6-8 weeks for a new site to get indexed. Google has definitely sped up to the point where I think we are all expecting instant results and sometimes that just doesn't happen.
I think this just might be a matter of patience. However, I am always willing to admit that I could be wrong and am interested to know what others think!
Dana
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
-
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's ability to crawl AJAX rendered content
I would like to make a change to the way our main navigation is currently rendered on our e-commerce site. Currently, all of the content that appears when you click a navigation category is rendering on page load. This is currently a large portion of every page visit’s bandwidth and even the images are downloaded even if a user doesn’t choose to use the navigation. I’d like to change it so the content appears and is downloaded only IF the user clicks on it, I'm planning on using AJAX. As that is the case it wouldn’t not be automatically on the site(which may or may not mean Google would crawl it). As we already provide a sitemap.xml for Google I want to make sure this change would not adversely affect our SEO. As of October this year the Webmaster AJAX crawling doc. suggestions has been depreciated. While the new version does say that its crawlers are smart enough to render AJAX content, something I've tested, I'm not sure if that only applies to content injected on page load as opposed to in click like I'm planning to do.
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
No descripton on Google/Yahoo/Bing, updated robots.txt - what is the turnaround time or next step for visible results?
Hello, New to the MOZ community and thrilled to be learning alongside all of you! One of our clients' sites is currently showing a 'blocked' meta description due to an old robots.txt file (eg: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt) We have updated the site's robots.txt to allow all bots. The meta tag has also been updated in WordPress (via the SEO Yoast plugin) See image here of Google listing and site URL: http://imgur.com/46wajJw I have also ensured that the most recent robots.txt has been submitted via Google Webmaster Tools. When can we expect these results to update? Is there a step I may have overlooked? Thank you,
Technical SEO | | adamhdrb
Adam 46wajJw0 -
Google is indexing blocked content in robots.txt
Hi,Google is indexing some URLs that i don't want to be indexed and also is indexing the same URLs with https. This URLs are blocked in the file robots.txt.I've tried to block this URLs through Google WebmasterTools but Google doesn't let me do it because this URL are httpsThe file robots.txt is correct so, what can i do to avoid this content to be indexed?
Technical SEO | | elisainteractive0 -
Webmaster tools doesn't pick up 301 redirect
I had a few hundred URLs that died on my site. Google Webmaster Tools notified me about the increase in 404 errors. I fixed all of them by 301 redirecting them to the most relevant page and did multiple header checks to ensure that the 301 has been implemented correctly. Now a few weeks later, Google is giving me the exact same message in Google Webmaster Tools but they are all still 301 redirected. WTF?
Technical SEO | | DROIDSTERS0 -
Robots.txt to disallow /index.php/ path
Hi SEOmoz, I have a problem with my Joomla site (yeah - me too!). I get a large amount of /index.php/ urls despite using a program to handle these issues. The URLs cause indexation errors with google (404). Now, I fixed this issue once before, but the problem persist. So I thought, instead of wasting more time, couldnt I just disallow all paths containing /index.php/ ?. I don't use that extension, but would it cause me any problems from an SEO perspective? How do I disallow all index.php's? Is it a simple: Disallow: /index.php/
Technical SEO | | Mikkehl0 -
Robots.txt
Hi everyone, I just want to check something. If you have this entered into your robots.txt file: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | PeterM22
Disallow: /fred/ This wouldn't block /fred-review/ from being crawled would it? Thanks0 -
We changed the URL structure 10 weeks ago and Google hasn't indexed it yet...
We recently modified the whole URL structure on our website, which resulted in huge amount of 404 pages changing them to nice human readable urls. We did this in the middle of March - about 10 weeks ago... We used to have around 5000 404 pages in the beginning, but this number is decreasing slowly. (We have around 3000 now). On some parts of the website we have also set up a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new ones, to avoid showing a 404 page thus making the “indexing transmission”, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. We've lost a significant amount of traffic, because of the URL changes, as Google removed the old URLs, but hasn’t indexed our new URLs yet. Is there anything else we can do to get our website indexed with the new URL structure quicker? It might also be useful to know that we are a page rank 4 and have over 30,000 unique users a month so I am sure Google often comes to the site quite often and pages we have made since then that only have the new url structure are indexed within hours sometimes they appear in search the next day!
Technical SEO | | jack860