"Google couldn't access your site because of a server connectivity issue"

Question

In Google Webmaster Tools on my dashboard I have a notice that appeared 2-3 days ago that says "Googlebot can't access your site".

Under the Current Status it has:

• DNS - SUCCESS
• Server Connectivity - FAIL
• Robots.txt Fetch - SUCCESS

However, if I "Fetch as Google" the fetch status returns successful. This is a Joomla site so my robots.txt is the default Joomla one which shouldn't cause any problems:

# If the Joomla site is installed within a folder such as at
# e.g. www.example.com/joomla/ the robots.txt file MUST be
# moved to the site root at e.g. www.example.com/robots.txt
# AND the joomla folder name MUST be prefixed to the disallowed
# path, e.g. the Disallow rule for the /administrator/ folder
# MUST be changed to read Disallow: /joomla/administrator/
#
# For more information about the robots.txt standard, see:
# http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html
#
# For syntax checking, see:
# http://www.sxw.org.uk/computing/robots/check.html

User-agent: *
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /logs/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /dev/

Any help with how to diagnose the problem? I'm not sure why this has suddenly cropped up for no apparent reason.

Answer 1

Google sends out a notice whenever it has issues connecting to your site.

The message will be similar to:

Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 205 errors while attempting to connect to your site.

I've seen it send notices for outages less than 1 hour but still reference the 24 hour window. If you only received one message on one day, then it's nothing to worry about. It was probably a short term outage at your webhost. You will receive a new notice for each 24 hour period if the problem persists.