Yoast SEO robots.txt issue

I launched my site 2 months ago and worked hard to set up the SEO side of it. Yet when I search for ‘technobiophilia’ Google only brings up my older sites, and my book, rather than the new http://www.technobiophilia.com. I don’t have this problem with Yahoo and Bing, where it comes up straight away.

I use Yoast, and just also installed XML Sitemap & Google News feeds to see if it helped. It didn’t.

I’ve got as far as running a test on the sitemap and got:

Warnings
Url blocked by robots.txt.
Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt.

Now, the urls relate to articles which I originally published elsewhere and which contain counters that go back to the original site e.g. https://counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/26837/count.gif but I can’t find a way to delete or exclude these counters.

Advice appreciated. thanks, Sue