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Why this issue is happening
For one or more of your products, you've submitted a landing page via the link [link] or link template [link_template] attribute that can’t be accessed by Google and may also not be accessible to Google users. The landing page or the image can't be crawled by Google because robots.txt forbids Google's crawler to download the landing page or the image.
If you recently updated your robots.txt file, your products will continue to show on Google for up to 30 days using your previously approved images. This grace period gives you time to update your robots.txt file before your products are disapproved.
How to fix your issue
Update the robots.txt file on your web server to allow Google's crawler to fetch the provided landing pages. The robots.txt file can usually be found in the root directory of the web server. For example, http://www.example.com/robots.txt.
In order for us to access your whole site, ensure that your robots.txt file allows both user-agents 'Googlebot' (used for landing pages) and 'Googlebot-image' (used for images) to crawl your full site.
You can allow a full-site crawl by changing your robots.txt file as follows:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:
User-agent: Googlebot-image
Disallow:
You can learn more about how to configure robots.txt here.
You can test your current configuration with the URL inspection tool.
Fix products one by one directly in Merchant Center
- Go to Products in Merchant Center, then select the Needs attention tab.
- Use the filter icon
above the table to find all products affected by your issue.
- Click on the title of the product you want to fix, then click Edit product.
- Update your product page link to a URL that can be accessed by Google.
- Select Save.
Fix multiple products at once
- Go to Products in Merchant Center, then select the Needs attention tab.
- Use the filter icon
- Select the Download icon
to download a list (.csv) of all affected products for all issues or this particular issue.
- Cross reference the downloaded list with your uploaded product data, and ensure that for these products the URLs that you’ve submitted using the link
[link]attribute lead to valid mobile landing pages. - Reupload your corrected product data to Merchant Center via your chosen upload method.
Next steps
After making the requested changes, your changes may take 24–72 hours to be reflected on the “Needs attention” page.
If you have fixed these issues and updated your products via a new feed upload or the Merchant API, the errors you receive should disappear within a couple of days. This time allows us to verify that we can crawl the landing pages that are provided, after which the products will start showing up in your Shopping ads and listings again. If you want to speed up the process you can increase Google's crawl rate.