Warnings in WMT – files that no longer even exist?

  • Sapphire

    (@sapphire)


    10 years, 12 months ago

    WordPress version: 3.5.1
    WordPress SEO version: 1.4.7 (tried to install dev version, but it said the directory already existed)

    I did this: Set it to handle my sitemaps, with a few things including “media” files set to noindex

    I expected the plugin to do this: notify engines of my posts and so on (which as far as I can tell, the plugin is doing correctly)

    Instead it did this: (it may be WMT, not the plugin)

    WebMasterTools gives me a “warning”:

    Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt.

    The examples it gives are media files that have been deleted. I can’t find their URLs in the sitemap, and none of my pages in the sitemaps are linking to them anymore.

    I found similar issues in the forum – some went away once Google updated its cache of the site’s robots.txt, but that’s not happened so far.

    Could it be that because Google EVER knew of the existence of these files, it’s still looking for them even though this new sitemap doesn’t list them? And it’s detecting that their directory is blocked, so it can’t spider them to find out they’re gone?

    I have a feeling this is a Google quirk rather than an SEO plugin issue. Does anyone know if it’s okay to have sitemap “warnings” in WMT? I don’t have any actual errors. I just don’t want to have an indexing problem over something as silly as this.

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/

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  • Thread Starter Sapphire

    (@sapphire)

    10 years, 11 months ago

    Have I done something incorrectly, that this is getting no response? I thought I followed all the instructions for getting support.

    Thread Starter Sapphire

    (@sapphire)

    10 years, 11 months ago

    Unfortunately, I’ve just found that Google is now indexing my photos, which is NOT a wanted behavior. I blocked the WP directories in robots.txt and set Yoast’s plugin to noindex media files, and yet this is happening.

    I have turned off the Yoast sitemap functionality in hopes that will solve the problem, and gone back to using Google XML Sitemaps, which never caused similar problems.

    I’m very disappointed at the lack of support, and I’m off to go review the Yoast SEO plugin now that I’ve used it thoroughly and discovered these problems. I will also be looking for a lighter weight SEO plugin, since this one didn’t replace the XML sitemaps plugin as I’d hoped.

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