Recovering from Programmers Error

[CrakJason]

Hey Everybody!

Last year one of my bigger sites hit a snaffu.  I was getting about 300k + hits a day from google, and then, when a developper released an update with a robots.txt file that basically blocked google from the entire site.

We didn't notice the bug until a few days later, but by then, it was already too late.  My google traffic dropped to 30k a day and I've been having the hardest time coming back ever since.

As a matter of fact, hundreds of sites that were aggregating my content started outranking me for my own terms.

For over a year, I've been working on building what I lost back and everything seemed to be coming together.   I was back at 100k+ hits a day

Until today... My developpers repeated the exact same error as last year.  They blocked google from crawling my site for over 5 days and now I'm down to 10k se hits a day.

My question :  Has anyone encountered this problem before and what did you do to come back?

[KeriMorgret]

I don't have an answer for your traffic, but I've had similar experiences with developers. I ended up using Code Monitor from Pole Position at https://polepositionweb.com/roi/codemonitor/index.php. I had it monitor the contents of the robots.txt file for the live site and all dev sites. Once a day it would check the file for any changes, and email me if there were changes, so I had a max lag time of 24 hours to be notified that the devs had done something again.

[SharewarePros]

My Friend,

I was having the exactly same problem, and finally my solution was add at operating system level the "Read-Only" attribute for this file.

Hope it help

Claudio