Just switched from private to public, blocked by robots.txt

[jord8on (Jordan)]

I just opened our forums to be discovered by Google and used the search console to index our site. (I’m not sure if there are other things that I should be doing ¯_(ツ)_/¯ (any suggestions?)

Here’s the feedback I got from Google Search Console:

[Stephen]

Have you checked your robots.txt?

[jord8on (Jordan)]

I’m not sure what to look at in my robots.txt or where to find it.

I did make sure this box was checked, in my admin settings…

[jord8on (Jordan)]

I don’t know if this makes a difference in the case of my question but one other thing to note is that i’m doing SSO and using Wordpress as my provider. would that make a difference, here?

My site is pickleballist.com
My forum is forums.pickleballist.com

[Stephen]

Your robots.txt lives in the root of each site, so:

https://pickleballist.com/robots.txt
https://forums.pickleballist.com/robots.txt

Nothing in those files is blocking Google, you can check this for yourself using third party robots.txt scanners, for example this tool by ryte.

Which confirms the robots.txt doesn’t block the Googlebot:

Google also has a tester within the search console.

[discovery1368 (John Son)]

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Delete the link to block in the disable file robots.txt

[riking (Kane York)]

Because your forum has been login_required and/or blocking indexing for so long, it’ll be a while before the crawler rechecks your robots.txt file and sees that it’s been unblocked. There’s probably a button to request a recrawl somewhere in there, or you can just wait.

[jord8on (Jordan)]

Yes you are right that it has been “login_required” for many months. Hopefully we’ll get indexed soon!