403s: Are There Instances Where 403's Are Common & Acceptable?
-
Hey All,
Both MOZ & Webmaster tools have identified 403 errors on an editorial site I work with (using Drupal CMS). I looked into the errors and the pages triggering the 403 are all articles in draft status that are not being indexed. If I am not logged into our drupal and I try to access an article in draft status I get the 403 forbidden error.
Are these 403's typical for an editorial site where editors may be trying to access an article in draft status while they are not logged in? Webmaster tools is showing roughly 350 pages with the 'Access Denied' 403 status.
Are these harmful to rank?
Thanks!
-
Hi guys and girls,
With regards to this, ss there any problem for SEO that you can see with banning spam refers through Htaccess?
So in these instances when a spam bots comes to the site, we throw a "Forbidden You don't have permission to access / on this server.", so basically a 403 error?
We're considering this as a more permanent solution to using filters in GA.
What do you think?
Thanks,
Gill.
-
Thanks Nicolas & Ruth. I realized the reason the pages are triggering errors is because there are published pages linking to those posts in draft. I imagine those draft posts were live at some point and then put back into draft.
Im guessing if I kill all the links to those draft posts that will fix the issue.
-
I agree that it's probably not a huge problem, but still something to clean up if you can - it would be best if crawlers weren't trying to access these pages.
-
If Moz and Webmaster Tools are showing the 403 error, it means that they are able to crawl to the URLs that are returning the 403 - so somewhere on your site or on the web, pages that are accessible by bots and crawlers are linking to these pages that don't exist yet. Having a bunch of errors on your site can impact Google's ability to crawl it well, which can impact your rankings, so it's best to get those cleaned up. In Webmaster Tools you should be able to click on the pages and see which pages are linking to them, so you can remove those links; you can do the same using a tool like Screaming Frog if you'd prefer. Good luck!
-
Hello,
No problem with these URLs, Drupal returns a 403 correctly because crawlers try to get draft content. Google and other search engines will not penalized you because of that : you can think of cart URLs or account URLs for ecommerce websites that may returns 403 the same way.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
MoZ & Other Keyword Tools
Hi There, 1- Does MoZ provide the data on “which keyword searchers are searching in a particular market”, so that I can make a better decision regarding my own keywords?If MoZ does not do this what other best tool is out there in market for this particular purpose? 2- Suppose I decide some keywords for my site and start doing optimization for them. "Does MoZ tell me “how much traffic my those keywords are receiving with the passage of time”. If MoZ does not do this what other best tool is out there in market for this particular purpose? 3- Does Moz give "data on competitors keyword activity also"? If MoZ does not do this what other best tool is out there in market for this particular purpose? Hope somebody with concrete knowledge and experience will enlighten me. Cheers Tanveer
Moz Pro | | Sequelmed0 -
Reminder: PRIVATE Q&A going away
Hello everyone, Just a quick reminder that today is the last day to ask a private question before we shut down private Q&A (see the full announcement at http://www.seomoz.org/q/private-question-shutdown). We encourage you to submit your private question before 12:00 Pacific Daylight Time today (so in the next two hours). After that, you will no longer be able to ask new private questions, but any questions that have been asked will be answered over the next few days. ONLY private Q&A is shutting down. Public Q&A is here to stay! You'll be seeing more activity in public Q&A from associates as they answer questions and endorse answers, and more feature development in public QA during the year.
Moz Pro | | KeriMorgret2 -
OSE Domains & Subdomains
Is there a compelling reason that OSE treats subdomains as part of a parent domain, rather than as a separate site? Or is this just a technical limitation? I ask because it's my understanding that Google treats subdomains more like separate domains than like parts of the parent domain. OSE treating them more like folders creates some frustrating situations when researching niches that are heavily filled with blospot and wordpress.com blogs. First of all, the domain authority in these situations is not at all indicative of the strength of the site. It also makes it hard to evaluate linking root domains at a glance, since all blogspot blogs count as one domain. So to see all blogspot sites linking you have to go to the full link list -- where each site may be listed hundreds of times -- and you can't group them because they're all considered the same domain. To be sure you when researching these niches you can just throw out domain authority as a metric, and export every report to excel where you can sort things in a way to make it easier to separate sites. But if there isn't a compelling SEO reason to have OSE function this way, I'd love to see those subdomains treated as separate sites so I can have access to all the easy to use SEOmoz metrics and layouts without the extra work. And of course if there is a compelling SEO reason for subdomains to be treated as domains, I'd love to be educated! : )
Moz Pro | | Ecreativeworks0 -
Garbled URL's in Private Messages.
Every time I try to put a url in a Private message it gets garbled up with extra chars and then won't go to the right place. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mariah-Carle-Photography Becomes: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mariah58973jhsdfui-Carle%8594743Photography Ok after that test I deliberately garbled a url and it STILL work in the open forums....
Moz Pro | | Mcarle0 -
I'd like to hook up a SEOMOZ campaign to one of my clients that I access through the AdWords MCC.
Can't seem to figure out how to go about it. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks JT
Moz Pro | | Johnthy320 -
Best way to use OSE Advanced Reports (Repost after Q&A issues)
I can see that Open Site Explorer's Advanced Reports feature is very powerful in terms of sifting through large amounts of link data, but does anyone have any useful tips on how to get the most out it? I want to use my 5 reports a month, but I want to make to maker sure I'm making the most of that allowance.
Moz Pro | | seanmccauley1