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Googlebot unable to crawl my site and robots.txt

Posted on January 1, 2015

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?



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

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

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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