Robots.txt file getting a 500 error - is this a problem?

[themegroup]

Hello all!

While doing some routine health checks on a few of our client sites, I spotted that a new client of ours - who's website was not designed built by us - is returning a 500 internal server error when I try to look at the robots.txt file.

As we don't host / maintain their site, I would have to go through their head office to get this changed, which isn't a problem but I just wanted to check whether this error will actually be having a negative effect on their site / whether there's a benefit to getting this changed?

Thanks in advance!

[StalkerB]

robots.txt isn't a requirement, indeed it's only voluntarily followed by spiders (as in they can choose to ignore it), so I think you'll be fine without it. The default is to 'allow all' and 'follow, index', so they should still be crawling the site correctly.

Check in Webmaster tools by fetching as Googlebot or alternative find a page and put cache:pageurl.html into google and see if it's cached it correctly.

That said returning a 500 instead of a 404 may be causing an issue that isn't obviously apparent and 500 is a bit too generic a message to say specifically what, but I would try and solve it as quick as possible. The benefits will depends on what you put in your robots.txt file

[themegroup]

Hi Barry,

Thanks for your swift response on this. The pages certainly seem to be getting cached correctly, and when we initially took over the SEO and made wholesale changes to the site, there were huge improvements, so it looks for all the world like the main pages at least are being looked at.

But I think you make a good point about getting it solved anyway so we can identify any problems that may be occurring / will occur later.