How do I find and edit my robots.txt file?

Site URL: https://www.stevemaskery.com/

Hi, I'm new to SS and not a lot of previous experience with HTML.

I have two domains, workshopessentials.com and stevemaskery.com, both of  which are forwarded to:

https://amphibian-celery-b7en.squarespace.com

I'm getting a nag from Google saying that I need to add a couple of lines to my robots.txt file so that it can index my images properly. How do I find and access this file please?

Many thanks
Steve

Ah, OK, thank you.

Google is telling me this:

Quote

 

Dear Google Merchant Center user,

Merchant Center Account:  xxxxxxxxx

We have detected a recent configuration change of the site hosting your images that result in the disapproval of some of your items in your Merchant Center account.

Since images are an important part of the rich product information shown in Shopping ads, we require that all items include a valid image that can be indexed by Google. We crawl the images you submit to Merchant Center every few weeks to ensure that users always see the most recent version. Our ability to crawl your images can be restricted with a robots.txt file, which might lead to the disapproval of affected items. Learn more about robots.txt by visiting https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608.

What's the issue?
We have detected that a robots.txt file that controls the indexing of some of your provided images has been updated recently. As a result of these updates we aren't able to index the images of some of your items. This will result in the disapproval of the affected items.

Details and impact:
Estimated percentage of offers affected: 100
File: http://www.workshopessentials.com/robots.txt

In order for us to access these images, please modify the robots.txt file mentioned above to allow the user-agent Googlebot-Image to index these images. You can do this by adding the following lines to the robots.txt file:

User-agent:       Googlebot-Image
Disallow:

If modifying this robots.txt file is not feasible you might want to consider hosting your images on a different hosting service that allows images to be indexed by Google.

 

Is this something I should be worried about or can I safely ignore it?

Many thanks
Steve

I am having the same issue... Did you find a resolution?

Hi Paul, 

Perhaps there is there a workaround? Or some alternative measure? 

@burmdoge What issue are you trying to address? 

Hi Paul,

I'm trying to get the index page on our Squarespace website indexed, but in the Google Search Console, URL inspection it's showing:

URL is not on Google: Indexing errors

Failed: Redirect error  

 https://mesaio.com.au

Looks like it's related to the robots.txt file, could you please help resolve this issue?

Thank you,

Dion

I'm having the same issue and my clients are getting very anxious about not being find-able on Google, it's been almost 3 months since we launched arcticroadrally.com. Please help!

See this article by Squarespace.

https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206543207-Understanding-Google-SEO-emails-and-console-errors

Squarespace robots.txt is blocking Google from indexing my blog posts.

How do I edit the robots.txt to stop this? Totally ridiculous. Checking before I have to move my site off of Squarespace as it will not allow blog posts to be indexed. Regular pages are indexed.

@MJB1923

Did you find any resolution to this? My blog posts are receiving the same Google message. Please let me know. 

Thank you, 

Jackie

On 9/5/2022 at 5:29 PM, MJB1923 said:

Squarespace robots.txt is blocking Google from indexing my blog posts.

How do I edit the robots.txt to stop this? Totally ridiculous. Checking before I have to move my site off of Squarespace as it will not allow blog posts to be indexed. Regular pages are indexed.

I experience the exact same!! Can someone from Squarespace please help? Because blogposts sure are NOT pages that google should not crawl. Tell us how to fix it or a lot of people will move their business away from squarespace. 

On 11/15/2022 at 11:14 AM, Chiara1234 said:

Squarespace robots.txt is blocking Google from indexing my blog posts. Can someone from Squarespace please help? Because blogposts sure are NOT pages that google should not crawl.

@Chiara1234 I believe you have misunderstood the message from Google.

Squarespace is not blocking Google from indexing your blog posts. Google is indexing your blog but Squarespace is correctly preventing Google from indexing the category links on your blog page, for example /blog/category/Reviews.

This link leads to duplicate content (the same blog posts that have already been indexed individually) and so this link should not be indexed, as I mentioned in my answer above.

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Can Squarespace PLEASE stop controlling this? It's unnecessary, has far reaching negative implications for users, and why? Who decided these things? Why should it not be indexed? Why can't the user decide this? What exactly will this break for Squarespace while it is positively hurting customers?