Google Experts I need your help
 

Hope some Google seo guy can help me out here..

About 12 days ago on may 31 my host suspended me. I was pissed off and posted about it here. Anyway, I decided to move to a new host which took a few days.

By around June 4 I was all back online and everything was fine except I had seen a huge drop in traffic - 99% was coming from Google and it dropped from like 1000 uniques to 200 or so.
It's now a week later and in Webmaster Tools it still says that by Robots.txt can't be found. This is despite using fetch as Google and getting a success notification on the 6th.

http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/2228/googlep.png

I'm concerned because I am getting this robots.txt from webmaster tools concerning every site on the server.

Oh and I am still ranking in Google and am still page 1 for many keywords.

Any ideas?

Can't help you with the robots.txt issue, but there was an update on the 5th that has affected off a lot of sites.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-u...ing-16885.html

Sounds like a DNS issue. It will fix itself eventually.

Really? After all this time, I though DNS usually only took 72 hours max to propogate, it's now been...

>> gets calculator out

... 192 hours

So no google experts on gfy.

Figures.

At the risk of asking the obvious, did you type in http://www.yourdomainname.com/robots.txt ? And if so, does it load?

are you sure the file actually exists ?

I had the same thing happen to 2 sites. They both disappeared right around the last penguin update so i just figured they were hit.

I didn't have them on webmaster tools so I added them for the fuck of it and I got that robots.txt warning.

I didn't have a robots.txt so I added it and they both popped up for their kws within 2 days.

Yes, it's there. This is what displays

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/

I'm sure they're lurking and snickering. You honestly think they're going to give away their top secret formulas for SEO - the very thing that keeps the cheques rolling in?

I don't proclaim to be a SEO Zen Master.. I know a thing or two, but why would I give that kind of information away to my competition? Oh we all joke and bullshit on here, but were all competitors fighting for the same slice of pie. Soon as one person comes on here and shows everyone the next best thing, then there's a hundred clones sites the very next week...

And for what its worth.. most of my sites seemed to be untouched on June 5th, the day that Penguin 2.0 apparently hit. Traffic as normal so who knows. :2 cents:

Well ok then, does anyone know why some of my sites have:

Either a yellow triangle with exclamation mark
or
A red circle with exclamation mark

In the robots.txt bit??

Whats the difference?

you know google has a forum right? :helpme

Do not use fetch as google to submit unless your site changed significantly like from selling tomatoes to selling cucumbers. :1orglaugh
If and only If the only problem was your site was unreachable by the bots, it will be back on track within a week. :thumbsup

first means there is error in it or some urls are blocked by it, 2nd means it is can't be fetched

login to googlw wmt, go to your site, and if it shows errors for pages, select all and hit, fixed

I remember the same thing happening to me before, no errors, just took a couple of weeks before google sorted itself out!?

If you wish, hit me up on icq. It doesn't sound like you have a problem with your robots.txt but I'll give things a once over for you. No charge or anything. Shouldn't take but a few minutes.

:1orglaugh

Just sayin', but go into Wordpress (If that's what you use) in Settings > Privacy and make sure "Allow search engines to index this site" is checked..