Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math, and sorry for any inconvenience caused.
The virtual robots.txt file is only generated when there is no robtos.txt file present in the root folder.
If you wish to use the robots.txt file in the root folder, you can add the rules in this file, Rank Math will not generate the virtual file.
Hope that helps.
Thank you.
Hello,
I have a robots.txt in the root folder and the virtual robots.txt is generated.
I have updated the sensitive data so you can check it by yourself. Can you please check further?
Thank you.
Hello,
We apologize for the unexpected delays.
Can you please clear your website cache and check the robots.txt again.
If the issue persists, we might need to take a closer look at the settings. Please edit the first post on this ticket and include your WordPress & FTP logins in the designated Sensitive Data section.
Please do take a complete backup of your website before sharing the information with us.
It is completely secure and only our support staff has access to that section. If you want, you can use the below plugin to generate a temporary login URL to your website and share that with us instead:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/temporary-login-without-password/
You can use the above plugin in conjunction with the WP Security Audit Log to monitor what changes our staff might make on your website (if any):
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-security-audit-log/
We really look forward to helping you.
Hi, thanks for your reply.
Sorry but this WordPress and FTP are only accesible via an internal VPN.
I’ve cleared the caché (CloudFlare & Autoptimize) with no lucky.
WordPress and Rank Math are updated.
Is there anything else we can do?
Thanks
Hello,
We understand.
In the URL you shared in the Sensitive Data section. The robots.txt in the primary domain has different content than the URLs with a translation folder (es and en).
Can you please clear your website cache including any server-level caching software such as Cloudflare?
See if this updates the robots.txt configuration to all of the URLs you shared.
Please note that the virtual robots.txt will only generate if our plugin can’t find any physical robots.txt in the root directory of your website.
You may try to disable Rank Math to see if the issue persists. If so, then this might be a caching issue.
Looking forward to helping you on this one.
Hi, there aren’t /es/ and /en/ physical folders. It’s because we’re using WPML plugin.
So, I’ve cleared CloudFlare’s and Autoptimize cache. Same result. All the robots.txt remain with the same content.
Also, I’ve disabled Rank Math plugin, and this make a little change:
The /es/robots.txt and the /en/robots.txt still exists, but without the sitemap’s line.
It seems to be an unrelated error with your plugin. I’ll keep investigating.
Thanks for your time
Hello,
It seems that you have already marked this ticket as “Resolved”. Can you please confirm if you have sorted it out?
Please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
Thank you.
