robots.txt - no file sudden drop in rankings

[mini_nick]

Hi,

I run a website for a friend and have seen a huge drop in ranking from October 2013, no changes to the site, no bad links etc. (I am not an seo but have some very outdated experience) I never created a robots.txt file, I thought that this was not vital if you didn't mind Google crawling the entire site / looking at all links. However it is the only thing I can think of that has caused a drop in ranking, does anyone know if any algorithm changes could have contributed to this huge loss in ranking?

Thanks

 

[Nik]

Depends what your site's content is, but many sites have had similar due to google algorithm updates, look up googles panda and penguin updates and you'll see. There's lots of sites with info about these as well as some ideas on why they might have effected your site and how to improve.

 

[C.J]

The robots file is only useful if you have an XML sitemap to point it to. So no, that won't make a difference on it's own.

There were a couple of updates to Google last year which will have an impact if you're not prepared.

Do you have Google Analytics installed? This will help massively with tracking. You may have pages with a high bounce rate, which will have a negative impact on the rest of the site.

Has the entire domain dropped, or just the main pages?

 

[mini_nick]

The bounce rate hasn't become significantly worse, what is interesting is that I get a warning when logging into webmaster tools to say "Googlebot can't access your site" also "Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 8 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site's overall robots.txt error rate is 100.0%."

Thanks for the help guys, any ideas? I have never had a robots.txt file on this site so am a little confused!