robots.txt timeout?

For some reason, my sitemap stopped working. It's not vbseo's fault because joomla's sitemap is too reported as broken in google webmaster's tools.

URL timeout: robots.txt timeout
We encountered an error while trying to access your Sitemap. Please ensure your Sitemap follows our guidelines and can be accessed at the location you provided and then resubmit.

Here's my robots.txt
http://www.chilehardware.com/robots.txt

These are my sitemaps:
VBSEO's: http://www.chilehardware.com/sitemap_index.xml.gz
Joomla's: http://www.chilehardware.com/index.p...=xml&no_html=1


how can a robots.txt be wrong? I edited it two days ago to add a delay for yahoo slurp. After noticing that google was avoiding my site, I removed that line. Now it doesn't work anymore

update: I temporarily removed robots.txt to see what happens.

I think someone else recently reported strange issues after updating their robots.txt file.

I thought that perhaps I uploaded it in binary mode, *shrug* anyway I have no robots.txt file right now, let's see what happens.

Ok, I removed robots.txt and now I'm getting this message:

Network unreachable: Network unreachable
We encountered an error while trying to access your Sitemap. Please ensure your Sitemap follows our guidelines and can be accessed at the location you provided and then resubmit.

I guess somehow I'm restricting googlebot from accessing my page, but where to look for that?

Please check this similar case: Google-Sitemap not loaded (403)

Hi There
i have the same problem
how can i solve this problem?
is it really from the server?
my sitemaps loading and opening normally
since 1 week every thing was okey with them and i saw all urls
but since 2 days i see this message:
Network unreachable: robots.txt unreachable
We encountered an error while trying to access your Sitemap. Please ensure your Sitemap follows our guidelines and can be accessed at the location you provided and then resubmit.

You should contact your host to find out whether they apply the same filtering.

I discarded the four most common reasons:

1.- It's not robots.txt, because I validated, edited and removed it, with no changes whatsoever.
2.- It's not my firewall (double checked, and the logs are showing header 200 for googlebot when he tries to crawl).
3.- It's not my host. My server isn't behind any filter or external firewall but mine.
4.- It's not the DNS, because I moved my domain's DNS to another nameserver and the problem is still there.

It's amazing. It took me five years to get there, and google took a week to destroy it.

omg
what should we do then?
google remove your site?

nope, it's not a google ban, nor have we done anything that can fall into "black hat SEO techniques". It's just that google's DNS cannot resolve my URL.

I've tried making google crawl my site directly by its IP number, and it does, but of course it retrieves a sitemap full of my urls, which in turn it cannot crawl.

my support told me the same first time
but i keep asking them, then they found that they block googlebot ip

It's not the case. I'm using an external DNS, and my server is directly attached to the internet.

To make sure, I used a spare domain I have, pointed to my machine, installed a copy of my site in another folder, created the vhost, then I went to google webmasters and added that domain: guess what, it passed with flying colors.

I insist: google cannot resolve my URL.

Edit: Finally, on saturday, the problem solved out of the blue. Google is back.

I lost a lot of pageviews but I hope I'll catch up soon to what we had.

how did you solve this problem?

my robots.txt is also timeouts, thats why; my google rank fell down. my forum was the first in search results but last 1 week it fell down to 8th. :(

sometime googlebot indexing, another day when i look it is not indexed. i can reach my robots.txt via int. exp. or firefox normally (forum.myforumsite.com/robots.txt) but google webmaster tools say; robots.txt timeout detected and then not indexing my sitemaps :(