404 robots.txt and traffic going down

[silverbytes]

Recently Iīve noticed 404 errors:

- -> /robots.txt

Seems like spiders are looking for that file. I never put robots.txt on my sites and thereīs no such a file in my /public_html/ directory.

buy I see traffic is going down and donīt know if it is because of that.

So what should I do?

[PhraSEOlogy]

Why dont you just add a robots.txt that allow all user agents access to everything - if thats what you want.

[dmorison]

If you don't need to block anything there is no need to have a robots.txt - it shouldn't be anything to do with your reduction in traffic.

[pendanticist]

Check this page out as it explains most everything regarding robots.txt:

Robots.txt Validator [searchengineworld.com]

Pendanticist.

[Mohamed_E]

The lack of a robots.txt file has nothing to do with the drop in your traffic.

Putting an empty robots.txt file will clean up your logs, it will have no other effect.

[Ryan8720]

Put in a robots.txt file that contains:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

This will allow robots to view all files.

But usually there is at least one thing that can be disallowed.

[silverbytes]

I did:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

But my site keeps tragically going down.
Past saturday (lowest day in visits) was 70
This is 12!

Iīm looking at google rankings and everyhting is ok...
What kind of problem would be causing this?
...

[Mohamed_E]

Quite a few people seem to be experiencing similar problems, see [webmasterworld.com...]

Of course, others are not and the whole issue is very murky.

Let me return to the robots.txt issue. Google either indexes a page or does not, so a bad robots.txt file (or robots meta tag) could make your page(s) drop completely from Google. But if they are indexed, they are indexed :) The lack of a robots.tx file will not cause Google to knock a couple of points off your PR.