When trying to subscribe to my (publicly shared) iCloud Calendar from Google Calender (as a view-only solution) I get the following error message:
Could not fetch the url because robots.txt prevents us from crawling the url.
Tried using webcal://, http:// and https:// .. Will this be fixed in the future?
Thanks!
Thomas
iPad 2
Yeah. I feel your pain. I called Apple yesterday about this very issue and they acknowledged that it was a problem. I guess we'll just have to wait and see if Apple and Google find a way to work this out...
I recently called Apple technical support for a problem I was having syncing my iCloud calendar with Google calendars. I copied the iCloud calendar URL and pasted it into Google's import box and got this error:
Could not fetch the url because robots.txt prevents us from crawling the url.
The ridiculous thing about this is that the very same calendar can easily be shared with a Yahoo calendar.
The guy at Apple's technical support was actually very friendly and helpful. He immediately understood the problem and took a couple seconds to see that he could easily reproduce the problem as well.
He told me he'd send a report on to engineering.
A couple weeks later, he got back to me and stated that Engineering acknowledged that this was an issue but they had no intention of addressing the problem.
I use iCal for my personal calendar and want to be able to import that into my work's google calendars. Unfortunately, according to Apple, I won't be able to do this simple task.
Sure would appreciate some guidance or suggestions here.
Thanks so much.
I found a solution, well, let's call it a workaround. It's actually two different ways of accessing the calendar, use whichever you like:
http://www.nxhelp.com/2011/11/accessing-icloud-from-google-calendar/
Cheers,
Thomas
Perhaps you should contact the admin of your work Google Apps calendar. Perhaps they disallow this. Another possibility is that the iCloud servers have a "no-index" setting to prevent Google's search crawlers from making your iCloud calendar publicly searchable.
Found on Google;s web support site.
Google Calendar users can't subscribe to publicly shared iCloud calendar
Basically, it would not be a good idea for me to be able to do a Google search and find your calendar. Apple put something in the robots.txt file telling the Google crawlers not to index the calendar. Unfortunately Google.com looks the same to any web server.
Hi Khurt,
this is exactly the reason why you are not able to "out-of-the-box" display your iCloud calendar in Google Calendar - and I agree, it does make sense to hide private data from the Google (or *name-your-search-engine*) crawlers.
Unfortunately I didn't have the time to test the solutions to that problem I have in mind, so I am just going to paste them here in case anyone wants to give it a shot:
1) Use the X-Robots-Tag http header
Place the following line next to the other header() calls in the php script:
header('X-Robots-Tag: noindex');
2) Use $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] to identify the user agent in the php script
Then decide for which useragent you *do* want to display content, and for which you may want to give an error message or simply a blank page.
List of search engine bots: http://antezeta.com/news/search-engine-crawlers
3) Similar to (2), use $_SERVER['REMOTE_HOST'] to find the source of the http request and block it accordingly
Maybe there is a more elegant solution than the ones mentioned, or maybe all possible solutions directly lead us to the problem where we are coming from (and thus Apple just lives with the fact that the calendar is not accessible from GCal). It's worth a try though 🙂
Cheers,
--
Thomas
I set up a service to handle this problem. Of course the real solution is for Google or Apple to fix it... but in the mean time this will work.
Hi jasonlfunk,
I tried your service, but got the error message:
Sorry, that doesn't look like an iCloud calendar URL.
The iCloud calendar URL I want to subscribe to starts with webcal://p01-calendarws.icloud.com/
etc.. and finishes with a -
Am I doing anything wrong? Do I need to change anything in the URL?
Thanks,
Arnaud
Most likely, the problem is that the whole URL is not visible on the website.
If you click the "Email" button and email yourself the Calendar request then you can copy the full link out of the email.
Thanks, you were absolutely right. I copied the link from the email and it worked a treat. I assume the service will keep the iCloud calendar updated?
Thanks again,
Arnaud
Anything that you put on your iCloud calendar will show up in Google after a couple hours (they only update so often).
Perfect, thank you very much.
Arnaud
What URL is the service expecting? How do I get the URL?
Hi Jason - thanks so much for your link/help. I've spent all morning trying to get my iCloud calendar onto google and this was the only thing that worked!
One question: i now have my normal Google calendar "Roly Allen", and an additional calendar "Calendar" which is the one I've just imported with your link. Do you know how I can merge the two (or add the entries from "Calendar" to "Roly Allen") so that I can just use the one main calendar "Roly Allen"?
Any help would be much appreciated.
Roly
It's expecting the "Share" url. You can get it from icloud.com in the calendar section.
Subscribe to Public Calendar from Google
