Morning Garry,

Bit of advice of poss. Since the new rules came into effect last month. I have seen a dramatic decline on clicks of my products within google shopping.

I can see all my products in merchant centre but do have image errors..

The image URLs submitted seem to be blocked by robots.txt. Google will not be able to display these images together with the products. Please change your robots.txt file to allow Google to download the image.

So don't know if this is the issue.

Any help much appreciated.. Also could do with knowing what is axeactly being picked up by goole as in my virtuemart backend as i don't know if its looking at part numbers title manufacturer and so on

Dave

Hi

Below is your robots.txt file which you can clearly see that it's set to disallow crawling to the components folder which is where virtuemart stores the images. Try removing this line out of the robots.txt and re-notify redmystic.com. You'll find the robots.txt file in your webroot.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /xmlrpc/
Sitemap: http://www.motocare.co.uk//index.php?option=com_redmystic&view=sitemap&format=raw&layout=raw&sitemap=sitemap.xml

Hi,

It varies depending on host and operating system.

The easiest way to do this is to download and install the extexplorer component. The robots.txt file will be located in the highest level directory. With extexplorer you will be able to edit the file.

Cheers,

Garry

Gary,

I have also had this problem on All of my sites ! Only since I upgraded RM to version 1.3.21 ( may be a coincidence )

CRITICAL ERROR

Roboted images (938 items) The image URLs submitted seem to be blocked by robots.txt.

Google will not be able to display these images together with the products. Please change your robots.txt file to allow Google to download the image.

938 items 100% of total

Examples from your items: http://www.sunglassescenter.co.uk/components/com_virtuemart/shop_image/product/Versace_VE_2107__4cb5a7d998f8a.jpg

What I have done

I have been changing the robots.txt file a few time to try and solve issue , It now reads # robots.txt file for http://www.sunglassescenter.co.uk/ User-agent: * User-agent: * Disallow: /administrator/ Allow: / User-agent: googlebot Disallow: Allow: /

In Google Webmaster Tools I have tested http://www.sunglassesCebter.co.uk/components and I get the Success message, Proving that this link is accessible by Googlebot ! Still no joy, I have asked about this on the Google merchant forum as well but no-one has any ideas why ! do you have any Ideas ?

I was thinking of re-installing an older version of RM , to see if problem goes away, I will try this today and let you know,

Thanks

Joe

If you are having the same problem, dont worry ! Its GOOGLE  ! Not us !  they are gradually reducing the numbers on the reports i get !

Just wait, All will be fine

Thanks Garry, I think the component seemed to do the trick.

i am still however getting errors with missing google product catagprys on all my items and not sure if this is a joomla setting opr a redmystic setting that i need to change.

Another thing i have noticed and not sure why i havnt noticed thid before is that around march sometime i had a dramtic decline in base clicks (see image) i really can't seem to think that anything was changed but the clicks just seem to drop off.

could you  also tell me if you do a plugin for wordpress too as i have another site www.meguiars-online.co.uk wihich is wordpress site and can't seem to find a plugin that seems to work well

Thanks

Dave

image attached

Attachments
 google.JPG [107 KB]

Dave,

The google categories are not in the feed so that's why google is complaining. To make that work you need to map your virtuemart categories to google ones. There's a configuration item under the google section to do this. It should be pretty obvious how do the mapping but post back if you have trouble. Once you've done that renotify to refresh your products.

Cheers,

Garry

Hi Garry,

I have done the above and not sure if this has done the trick, as google product catagory is still highlight in red,I have also been checking some of the attributes within google is that the MPN within the feed has nothing to do with the product. ie  i can only search for a product sku if its within the product title. if i search it by sku it returns nothing. the MPN in the feed show somethi9ng like 

120e2ed86ffd377d931cbf9a2cfaadde if i do a google serch for this it shows my product when in fact the sku within virtuemart is Q6600 all my products have similar MPN sp it seems the fed is replacing the viruemart SKU with something completely different

Any help much appreciated as its really frustrating now

Cheers