Have You Ever Gotten False or Odd Notifications from Google Webmaster Tools?
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I just got an email for one of my client websites from Google Webmaster Tools letting me know that the Google Bot could not access the website? The notification indicated that there may be a robots.txt issue that prevented crawling, but that they would try something to crawl it again.
In this situation, we had just created a new Webmaster Tools account for the client, and there were (are) two GWT accounts now for the website, one that is incorrectly set to http://clientwebsite.com and the other that is set to www.clientwebsite.com. One of them reports zero errors, and the other reports an odd crawl error.
Anyone encountered this type of thing before?
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Try to fetch the url as Google bot and see if the issue still remains . If it does you might need to review your robots.txt file. Else it probably was some issue GoogleBot had while it tried to crawl the site.
You will need to setup both http://clientwebsite.com and http://www.clientwebsite.com to set the Preferred domain from GWT. so its ok to have both in there. But your site should ( in most cases ) only be accessible from either the one with www or without.
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I agree with Bradley. The two accounts in GWT are separate, so the fact that you have two should not cause an interaction.
I once got a notification about a sudden drop in traffic to my home page was listed as a "Big traffic change for top URL". It happened on Thanksgiving. It was not an error, just people are not going to visit this particular site on Thanksgiving. More of a false positive than anything.Cheers!
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I'm not sure that I've ever got a false notification before, but I got the exact notification you are describing a while back. It seemed as though there was a problem with the robots.txt file. Turns out the domain didn't have a robots.txt file, so rather than guess Google decided to stop crawling it until I created one.
If your site doesn't have a robots.txt file, make sure you create one. If the site already has one, look over it for syntax errors that Google may be tripping over.
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