Hi all, I've got two sites parked on the same IP both of which are suddenly getting ERRORS on my google dashboard in the sitemap section. The error says: Network unreachable: robots.txt unreachable We were unable to crawl your Sitemap because we found a robots.txt file at the root of your site but were unable to download it. Please ensure that it is accessible or remove it completely. I hadn't changed the robots.txt file for either of them, but I rebuilt them anyway. Resubmitted, and 8 hours later got the same errors. I then removed the robots.txt files completely from the root of each add-on domain... errors again. I double-checked the root directory that these two domains are parked on, but there is no robots.txt file at all. After some internet searching, it was suggested I call my hosting company to see if they'd changed anything on the server. I did, and they assured me they hadn't. They suggested I contact google. I was wondering if any of you had experienced the same or similar problems, or if this was just a google hiccup that would disappear after a couple of days. It's been four days now, and I don't want this to hurt my existing indexing (would it?) Thanks in advance!
That sounds pretty strange. I sure hope it won't hurt your existing indexing- I really don't know. One thing though, it seems that almost anything nowadays can influence Google in either direction.
Thanks Notorious. I was worried google would de-index pages thinking I'm trying to protect the site against spiders.
Sometimes if your server is offline for maint. or w/e google won't be able to grab the file at that time but will pick it up on it's next visit.
Ive had this a couple of times, infact ive got 1 site saying it just now, a new one. The last time it happened it cured itself after a week or so, didnt seem to make any dif to my site.
I don't think it will make any damage, because its just an error. What i could harm is the new indexing, until its cured i guess Google will not continue indexing your site (i mean, adding new pages, nut old one, already indexed wont suffer).
Just in case anyone is looking this post up months/years later, this problem corrected itself after 5 or 6 days. I think google just farted when it crawled my site.