Anyone know how I fix "robots.txt file unreachable"

[airbrushmakeupshop]

I'm getting an error code in Google Analytics. It shows "robots.txt file unreachable" and this is the explanation they give:

"Before we crawled the pages of your site, we tried to check your robots.txt file to ensure we didn't crawl any pages that you had roboted out. However, your robots.txt file was unreachable. To make sure we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. When this happens, we return to your site later and crawl it once we can reach your robots.txt file. Note that this is different from a 404 response when looking for a robots.txt file. If we receive a 404, we assume that a robots.txt file does not exist and we continue the crawl."

Anyone know what I can do to fix this?

Thanks,
Arlina

[robm]

Arlina,

When I go to:
http://www.airbrushmakeupshop.com/robots.txt

I get an internal server error, which is not correct. I should get the output of your robots.txt file. You will want to make sure permissions are set correctly for this file, that it exists, and that you do not have a .htaccess rule interfering with its display.

You may need to ask your host why this file will not display on the web if the above does not help.

[airbrushmakeupshop]

Hey Rob,

Thanks for addressing this problem, unfortunately this is all greek to me.

Where do I find where the permissions are set? With Shopsite, Google or Hostgator? And how would I know if i have a .htaccess rule?

Thanks again,
Arlina

[robm]

Arlina,

You will want to touch base with hostgator (your host) for issues with permissions related to your robots.txt file and the existence of a .htaccess file.

[lonepine]

I am having trouble getting Google Products to crawl http://lonepinestore.com after I upload my products.

Google said "
Thank you for your email. I understand that your items are not appearing
in Google Product Search. This is because your item pages were unavailable
when we visited them.

Please make sure that your site isn't blocking us from accessing your item
pages. For example, if you have a robots.txt file, please ensure the
user-agent "googlebot" is not being blocked from the directory containing
your item pages. Once you confirm that nothing is blocking us from
visiting your site, please try uploading your data feed again.

This is the lines of code I got from Hostgator when I did a http://lonepistore.com/robots.txt

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
-<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> -<sitemap> <loc>http://cdn.attracta.com/sitemap/783847/0.xml.gz</loc> <lastmod>2011-06-24</lastmod> </sitemap> </sitemapindex

What does it mean????.

[BFChris]

That does not look like proper contents of a robots.txt file. It is an XML file apparently pointing to a site map.

I think you should contact Hostgator support.