"robots.txt unreachable" prevents googlebot crawling

[jb0217]

Hello everyone

Since June 8 Googlebot has stopped crawling my website. I used to have over 10000 pages and daily visits by googlebot. I never had a robots.txt cause I didn't need one (my server returned 404s when asked for it).

Since that day, more and more of my pages are listed as "Unreachable URLs" and the cause for all of them (about 5000) is "robots.txt unreachable". 404s are supposed not to be a problem, but I event added a robots file
User-Agent: *
Disallow:
just in case.

The thing is that, according to my logs googlebot has never come around again, while more and more errors keep adding to the list every day. Some of the errors are recorded 3-4 day ago, but I have seen absolutely no google activity in my logs since June 8.
The same happened to my sitemap, which also supposed to be unreachable.

Any ideas?

Thanks

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[edited by: tedster at 12:11 am (utc) on June 29, 2007]

[tedster]

according to my logs googlebot has never come around again, while more and more errors keep adding to the list every day

This sounds very odd to me, as if there is a technical error on Google's end. There is also a chance of a server error on your side, I suppose -- are you looking at your error logs? Some servers record errors in a dedicated log file. That's why I ask.

If you are pretty sure of no errors on your server, and googlebot really isn't crawling your domain, then I'd say write to Google through your webmaster tools account and describe the situation.

[jb0217]

Thanks for the response,

I have already reported at:
[google.com...]

but the only suitable category that allowed me to send message was:Other -> None of the above (other more relevant problem types did not have the option to send a message). So I am not optimistic about that.

Do you know of a more suitable way to report my problem?

I also checked my pages by trying to translate them with the language tool and they are not accessible by it either.

Do you know of a way to check if some google IPs are banned by my host's firewall?

Any other ideas?

Thanks