Emojipedia blocked access to their site in robots.txt. Fail story?

Emojipedia, the large emoji-providing site, has just committed SERP visibility suicide. They changed their robots.txt file to an absolute “Disallow” for all user agents after August 9th, 2023.

I use emojis a lot. I usually go to Google to find the ones I need, and I often end up at Emojipedia. Just today, I noticed that their snippet is different.

Yep, there is goes. No info about the result? Let’s check their robots.txt file.

This change occurred on August 9, 2023, according to what I found in the Wayback Archive. By the way, the Wayback Archive is great for checking if and when your competitors have made any changes to their robots.txt files

How can this happen?

I feel like Emojipedia has changed their design recently. Based on my experience of over 13 years, that’s usually the most common reason.

According to Ahrefs’ estimates, traffic has also been declining since August 10, 2023.

As this change has persisted for several days, I believe they are unaware of what is happening.

Update 8.9.2023: Their robots.txt has been fixed at August, 19th. So it took them 10 days to notice and fix.

How can you protect yourself from a similar failure?

You can set up a simple monitoring script in Google Sheets that checks your robots.txt file daily or even three times per day. The script will send you an email alert if the file changes. This script comes from Spotibo, and you can get your free copy here.