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
-
I have 702 'No-Index' warnings. Is this bad?
Moz has giving me 702 'No-Indexed Meta-descriptions' warnings. My page has quite a bit of product pages as it is a commercial chemical company which sells cleaning products for restaurants, hospitals, etc. Im wondering if this is effecting my site negatively?
Moz Pro | | ACSmt0 -
I'VE DONE EVERYTHING RIGHT BUT STILL GET LOW GOOGLE RANKING
Moz Pro Dashboard compared my site to three competitors' site. My site is better in every aspect. My DA is higher, I have four times more external links, I have more relevant content than my competition, my site also is the fastest, I have solved all redirect issues, there is no broken link internally or externally. We are custom home builders. So all our sites have numerous full screen images. I have optimized all of them. When I ran WebPageTest on my competition, they all fail. My site got A's in all categories. The three competitors' sites rank first, second and third. My site ranks bottom on the 2nd page. Since my site was online last January, I have spent thousands of dollars on SEO work. Its url is www.pokudesign.com I am hoping somebody can point me in the right direction. I am attaching a screen shot of my Moz Pro Dashboard. frEpZ
Moz Pro | | pokongku0 -
Why does a word show as 'Google en-US Mobile Friendly' = FALSE when it also shows that it ranks 3 on mobile?
I pulled a recent report for all words I'm tracking locally and it states that a specific term ranks #4 on desktop and #3 on mobile. But in separate columns, specifically "Google en-US Mobile Friendly" that same terms shows as 'FALSE'. Any idea what this means? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | KristinaWitmer0 -
Increase in authorization permission errors (Access Denied - Error 403)
Hi MOZ community, Since last week when I changed my theme in a WP installation I noticed (in WMT and MOZ tool) that I have increased number in authorization permission errors (error 403-forbidden). What happens is that I received a 403 error for almost every single URL of my site. All these URLs are not "real" ones but they all have my email in the end. i.e. I get an 403 error for the "/contact/[email protected]" whilst the real URL is just "/contact/" This happens, as I said, for almost every single page of my site. I have no other crawling or indexation issues, all URLs are correctly indexed. All new pages are correctly indexed as well. URIs ending with "[email protected]" are not indexed off course. WP and all installed plugins & theme are on the latest available release. For SEO purposes I use Yoast SEO WP plugin. The site in questions is: fantasylogic.com Any suggestions would be highly appreciated. Thank you in advance
Moz Pro | | gpapatheodorou0 -
How to solve duplicate page title & content error
I got lot of errors in Duplicate page title - 5000 Here the result page is same and content is also same,but it differs only with page no in meta title Title missing error In seomoz report i got empty msg - title,meta desc,meta robots,meta refresh But if i check the link which i got error it shows all meta tags..we have added all meta tags in our site..But i dont no why i got title missing error . 404 error In this report,if i click the link which i got error, it goes to main page of our site. But the url differs. eg: The error link is :www.example.com/buy/requirement-2-0-inmumbai-property it automatically goes to www.example.com page Let me know how to solve these issues.
Moz Pro | | Rajesh.Chandran0 -
Q&A Performance Improvements
Howdy! We've made some performance improvements to Q&A, and things should be much speedier now. If you see anything amiss, please leave a reply here or send a note to [email protected]. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | KeriMorgret1 -
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 -
UK Google Results .com V's .co.uk
In the UK lots of people use google.com rather than google.co.uk. See: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2008/04/how_popular_is_googles_pages_from__the_uk_search_option.html The above data is a bit out of date but still I know lots of UK people who search on google.com. When I depersonalise the results and search there is a difference between what I see on google.com V's what I see on google.co.uk. Indeed one of the companies I work for ranks ok on google.co.uk, but not so well on google.com Questions: How would I best track ranking for UK based users who use google.com AND/OR google.co.uk using the SEOmoz tools (or other tools if appropriate)? I note that in "Google Webmaster Tools" you can change the setings to "Target users in United Kingdom". Given the fact that UK users use both google.com AND/OR google.co.uk would it be better to change this to unlisted or deselect the "Target users in" option? Thanks in advance. Justin
Moz Pro | | GrouchyKids0