Robots.txt errors

Robots.txt errors

The robots.txt file is a text file that instructs web robots (like search engine bots) how to crawl pages on your site. One main use for it is to tell robots not to visit certain pages of your site. An error in the robots.txt file can be a big problem -- if the file is telling search engine bots not to crawl your site, it won't show up in search results. 

By default, we block all bots from wp-admin/ and wp-includes/ folders, as no bot needs to access those administrative directories.

Message from Amazon

If you receive a message from Amazon about robots.txt saying that their crawler doesn't have access to your pages, please forward the message on to us so we can look into it. However, it's very likely to be a false positive -- we've had several of these recently.

Errors in Google's mobile-friendly test tool 

If you run a test in Google's mobile-friendly test tool and come up with errors, this is also unlikely to be a problem.  There are some pages of your site that we disallow access for security reasons, or because the bots just don't need access to them. This is the case for files within the wp-admin and wp-includes directories.

However, if you do run a test like this and see errors that don't include wp-admin and wp-includes, please take a screenshot of the results and forward it on to us at support@performancefoundry.com. We'll look into it and let you know if it's a false positive or if action needs to be taken.

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