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Temporarily unreachable – Google Search Console GWT

26 Mar 16

Are you getting struggled from the Temporarily unreachable error into your Google Webmaster Tools – Search Console?

It’s unbelievable that if you google this problem you will only find the obvious: “don’t worry, it’s a temporary problem”, or “your site is penalized

Well, in my case, everything that I found on the web didn’t fit with my situation.

New domain, new server, and since I used CloudFlare to cache everything I was worried that the problem was really CloudFlare itself.

I checked everything: DNS, Server Connection, Routing issues, etc. –  without any luck.

robots.txt-error

There was just another error into GWT regarding the robots.txt…. “Are you telling me that…?”

Yeah, you understand it correctly and I’m not kidding.

  1. I created the robots.txt file and make it available (previously it was returning 404)
  2. Pushed it to Google via Search Console
  3. Re-pushed the domain root
  4. …and voilà!

robots-txt-saved-my-life

 

Long story short

If you get the “Temporarily unreachable” error from Google Webmaster Tools/Google Search Console, it could be that Google fails to fetch your website since you’re not correctly delivering the robots.txt file.

 

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