{"id":525,"date":"2023-08-17T15:39:10","date_gmt":"2023-08-17T13:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/?p=525"},"modified":"2023-09-08T09:58:46","modified_gmt":"2023-09-08T07:58:46","slug":"emojipedia-robots-txt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/emojipedia-robots-txt\/","title":{"rendered":"Emojipedia blocked access to their site in robots.txt. Fail story?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Emojipedia, the large emoji-providing site, has just committed SERP visibility suicide. They changed their robots.txt file to an absolute &#8220;Disallow&#8221; for all user agents after August 9th, 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"443\" height=\"144\" src=\"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/2023-08-17_15h04_30.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-535\" srcset=\"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/2023-08-17_15h04_30.png 443w, https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/2023-08-17_15h04_30-300x98.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 443px) 100vw, 443px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">No information is available about this page (in Czech, where I come from)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Yep, there is goes. No info about the result? Let&#8217;s check their robots.txt file.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full\"><img decoding=\"async\" width=\"359\" height=\"147\" src=\"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/2023-08-17_15h04_48.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-526\" srcset=\"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/2023-08-17_15h04_48.png 359w, https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/2023-08-17_15h04_48-300x123.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 359px) 100vw, 359px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p>This change occurred on August 9, 2023, according to what I found in the <a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20230809013820\/https:\/\/emojipedia.org\/robots.txt\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20230809013820\/https:\/\/emojipedia.org\/robots.txt\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Wayback Archive<\/a>. By the way, the Wayback Archive is great for checking if and when your competitors have made any changes to their robots.txt files<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full\"><img decoding=\"async\" width=\"330\" height=\"139\" src=\"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/2023-08-17_15h26_31.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-527\" srcset=\"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/2023-08-17_15h26_31.png 330w, https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/2023-08-17_15h26_31-300x126.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 330px) 100vw, 330px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p>How can this happen?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I feel like Emojipedia has changed their design recently. Based on my experience of over 13 years, that&#8217;s usually the most common reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>According to Ahrefs&#8217; estimates, traffic has also been declining since August 10, 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"998\" height=\"569\" src=\"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/2023-08-17_15h28_42.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-529\" srcset=\"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/2023-08-17_15h28_42.png 998w, https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/2023-08-17_15h28_42-300x171.png 300w, https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/2023-08-17_15h28_42-768x438.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 998px) 100vw, 998px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>As this change has persisted for several days, I believe they are unaware of what is happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Update 8.9.2023<\/strong>: Their robots.txt has been fixed at August, 19th. So it took them 10 days to notice and fix.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>How can you protect yourself from a similar failure?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 <a href=\"https:\/\/spotibo.sk\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/spotibo.sk\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotibo<\/a>, and you can <a href=\"http:\/\/bit.ly\/spotibo-sheets\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"http:\/\/bit.ly\/spotibo-sheets\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">get your free copy here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Emojipedia, the large emoji-providing site, has just committed SERP visibility suicide. They changed their robots.txt file to an absolute &#8220;Disallow&#8221; for all user agents after August 9th, 2023.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-page-seo"],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Zdenek Dvorak","author_link":"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/author\/gyd\/"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":false,"thumbnail":false,"medium":false,"medium_large":false,"large":false,"1536x1536":false,"2048x2048":false},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"Zdenek Dvorak","author_link":"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/author\/gyd\/"},"uagb_comment_info":3,"uagb_excerpt":"Emojipedia, the large emoji-providing site, has just committed SERP visibility suicide. They changed their robots.txt file to an absolute &#8220;Disallow&#8221; for all user agents after August 9th, 2023.","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=525"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":552,"href":"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525\/revisions\/552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linki.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}