My site is missing. Did my robots.txt trigger this?

[RoyalChina]

There are many pages on my site with quite similar texts, with different images for people to download for free. I am scared that these pages may get me punished for dupilicate content. Thus I upload a robots.txt file which aims to stop SEs from those similar pages. This is my robots.txt file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /directory-name/

But two days after the robots.txt online, I find that Google drops all my pages except the homepage, url only in its index. SERP for my major listing is gone now. Is my robots.txt wrong? What shall I do next?

[Johan007]

It looks like it validates then no that is not the reson.

[Freedom]

I'm having problems with a website getting indexed after 3.5 weeks and I think it's my robots.txt getting interpreted wrong by Google (it was a bit of complicated robots.txt file), so I deleted it today.

I have enough links to the site to get it indexed and some other small sites released at the same time are indexed, but didn't have robots.txt

The site is getting crawled daily and is invested in Adwords, so I just don't see what else the problem could be.

We'll see if deleting the robots.txt file helped, if not, I am ready to move it to a different host which I already have set up, just have to change the DNS.

[lammert]

RoyalChina, where the pages you wanted to keep also in the directory you mentioned in robots.txt? If so, that may have caused your problem. If not, just relax and in about a month your pages will be back.

I had a similar problem with my weblog some months ago. Each content page was indexed two times, one time as the real content page and one time with a date identifier in the URL. I added meta robot tags to all pages I wanted to remove and in the week after most listings in Google went URL only. It seemed that such a sudden change in robot noindex information caused the Google index algorithm to recalculate all necessary index locations for the remaining pages. In about a month all pages I wanted to be indexed were back in the index including snippets, cache etc.

[RoyalChina]

Thanks for the reply, guys. I have deleted my robots.txt file and using meta robots tag to remove those files. It looks Google might misinterprete my robots txt.