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#748 – Robots.txt blocking Googlebot

Posted in ‘sh404SEF’

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Tuesday, 28 July 2015 17:19 UTC

KLarkin

Installed sh404SEF and the website robots.txt is not blocking googlebot. The website is no longer mobile friendly.

What setting did I mess up?

Thank you,

Kayle

Wednesday, 29 July 2015 11:25 UTC

wb_dimitris

Hi Kayle,

robots.txt is a file that is not touched by sh404SEF. Do you still have this file in the root of your site? are the permissions correct?

Also you mention that your site is not mobile friendly anymore: was it before?

Regards

Wednesday, 29 July 2015 16:06 UTC

KLarkin

Dimitirs,

Thank you for the quick reply. A lot of people received the notification that Googlebot cannot access CSS and JS files yesterday. I do not believe this is related to having installed sh404SEF anymore.

New to working with Joomla, my background is in journalism; I do not know what you mean by "this file in the root of your site." How would I verify that the permissions are correct?

Yes, the website was mobile friendly when checked in March 2015.

Wednesday, 29 July 2015 16:21 UTC

wb_dimitris

Hi Kayle,

There are a lot of components, modules and plugins that use either the cache folder or their installation folder to deliver scripts or stylesheets. Recently Joomla updated the robots.txt file to disable bots from accessing those folders and hence the whole mess. All the static files should originate from the folder media, this is the recommendation from Joomla, but it seems that developers are abusing that!

Root folder most probably will be the folder public_html in your server. It is the folder that also has configuration.php and index.php.

To verify the permissions just head on administrator to System->System Information and then select the tab Directory Permissions. Everything should be green there.

Regards

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