Googlebot unable to crawl my site and robots.txt

January 1, 2015 4.6k views
neilrooney
By:
neilrooney

I am running the Ghost application on Ubuntu 14.04 and have my site up and running.

I am having problems with Googlebot being unable to crawl my site and access my robots.txt. The robots.txt file is accessible via a web browser. This is the error I am getting.

Your server returned a 5xx (unreachable) error when we tried to retrieve your robots.txt file.

I have correctly set permissions for all files and checked nginx for any issues that I could find with no luck.

Any ideas?

Edit: I just did a pingdom dns check and I am getting errors with PTR records?

1 comment
  • jtittle1 January 2, 2015

    @neilrooney

    Did you install a pre-configured image or did you install your own stack? If you did your own stack, let me know how you went about installing / configuring (i.e. from source, using apt-get, I changed “this” and “that”).

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4 Answers
neilrooney January 2, 2015

I installed using a pre-configured image. Apart from the nginx config nothing was changed.

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ShenZhouHong January 3, 2015

Whats the ls -al output of your robots.txt? If your robots.txt is located at /var/www/directory/robots.txt, please cd /var/www/directory/, and run a ls -al.

Perhaps the file permissions are making it inaccessible.

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neilrooney January 17, 2015

I solved this problem a week ago. Turns out Googlebot requires TLSv1 to be turned on.

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Navinpathak7 January 27, 2015

Hello,
I have same problem in my website shubhh.com(That’s running on Ubuntu LAMP on 14.04), But my site have 15-16 server errors in Google crawl errors, can given soln “Turns out Googlebot requires TLSv1 to be turned on” resolve my error without affecting my website , If yes please define me how to turned on “Googlebot requires TLSv1”.

Please any one help me.
Thank you.

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  • neilrooney January 28, 2015

    Hi @Navinpathak7,

    I was having this problem because I am using an SSL certificate for my site. Do you have SSL installed?

    If you do then you need to edit your ssl.conf file (or hppd.conf). Change whatever you have to this:

    SSLProtocol -all +SSLv2

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