Accidentally blocked root access, doh!

[ninjaNeen]

I was fiddling with the settings in my robots.txt to hide my directories from prying eyes. I read on this forum that you can replace Disallow: /includes with something shorter. In a moment of stupidity I shortened it to /in which of course blocks all access to the site. Great. Nice work.

Now that I've corrected my robots.txt will Google ever be able to update its version of that file, if it can't even access the root directory of the domain?

Thank you for advice, and keeping fingers crossed that I didn't stuff it up for good :o(

[ninjaNeen]

I can answer my own question.. Google came along during the night and updated the robots.txt despite being blocked from seeing it by the previous version. Phew.

[goodroi]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld ninjaNeen!

The first thing googlebot does when it visits a site is to request the robots.txt file regardless of what happened on previous visits. Based on the robots.txt it determines what else to crawl on the site (if anything). For your situation you were fine.

If you had made a change to a page (ie redirect or robots metatag) then you would need to make sure NOT to block that page with robots.txt so googlebot could crawl the page and discover the change.

cheers