Pages Returning A 403 Error
-
Hiya Moz Community
I hope you are all great, I have a question regarding one of my websites, I have the main site and 2 sub folder sites essentially, I decided to upgrade one of the sites and placed it in a different sub folder, I then set up a 301 redirect to the new location, so far so good, I have been having a look at my link profile using AHrefs, inside there is an SEO report facility, I ran the report and I have over 500 pages returning a 403 or Forbidden error. my question is whether the Equity from those pages is being passed to the new site?
I actually removed all the old site from Google Cache to avoid misleading visitors, I suppose I could set the re-directs up manually if I the equity is not being passed to the new site although I was under the impression it would be, or 85% - 90% of it would be anyway.
The reason why I am asking is that I have seen a significant drop in rankings for keywords that my site has always ranked highly for. thought I would see if you guys can clear that up for me.
Thanks and regards
Wes Dunn
-
hahaha.. Im not afraid of hard work, I know it's not the most glamorous job but I am obviously quite happy about it, I worked hard building up the SEO of all my pages on the old site, just a bit naive not to know the answer to that one already but that's why I am here. to get help from the best out there.
thanks again and best of luck
regards
Wes Dunn
-
Good luck, its a nasty job but has to be done for your own good Cheers.
-
Thanks Microdesign to be honest I have only just thought about checking into it as I only performed the upgrade a few weeks ago, I thought Moz may give me some indication when it does the weekly crawl on my site but the only errors that have come back are smaller issues like a few duplicate titles or missing Meta Description for pages that are not majorly important.
Thanks for the reply, I have a list of all the URL's so I will go to work
regards
Wes Dunn
-
If the pages return a 403 they are not passing through any link equity. Why can't you 301 all of the old links to the new location. That would be the way. the 403's can really hurt your site + rankings. Just removing all old content and doing nothing else is not the way to go. all old urls should return 301 to the correct ones!
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
-
How to optimize count of interlinking by increasing Interlinking count of chosen landing pages and decreasing for less important pages within the site?
We have taken out our interlinking counts (Only Internal Links and not Outbound Links) through Google WebMaster tool and discovered that the count of interlinking of our most significant pages are less as compared to of less significant pages. Our objective is to reverse the existing behavior by increasing Interlinking count of important pages and reduce the count for less important pages so that maximum link juice could be transferred to right pages thereby increasing SEO traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Better to 301 or de-index 403 pages
Google WMT recently found and called out a large number of old unpublished pages as access denied errors. The pages are tagged "noindex, follow." These old pages are in Google's index. At this point, would it better to 301 all these pages or submit an index removal request or what? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Page title inconsistency
Hi folks, Our agency rebranded from New Brand Vision to Decibel Digital a few weeks ago. Most things seem to be fine, 301 redirected the site and our site looks much better however there is one issue. When searching for our responsive site using my Iphone5, the page title appears as "New Brand Vision", even though "New Brand Vision" isn't within the source code. Our page title is <title></span><span data-mce-mark="1">Creative Digital Agency in London | Decibel Digital </span><span class="html-tag" data-mce-mark="1"></title> which is picked up on Desktop, but not through mobile search when sourcing our responsive site. Does anyone have any suggestions? Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tangent0 -
Redirecting thin content city pages to the state page, 404s or 301s?
I have a large number of thin content city-level pages (possibly 20,000+) that I recently removed from a site. Currently, I have it set up to send a 404 header when any of these removed city-level pages are accessed. But I'm not sending the visitor (or search engine) to a site-wide 404 page. Instead, I'm using PHP to redirect the visitor to the corresponding state-level page for that removed city-level page. Something like: if (this city page should be removed) { header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rriot
header("Location:http://example.com/state-level-page")
exit();
} Is it problematic to send a 404 header and still redirect to a category-level page like this? By doing this, I'm sending any visitors to removed pages to the next most relevant page. Does it make more sense to 301 all the removed city-level pages to the state-level page? Also, these removed city-level pages collectively have very little to none inbound links from other sites. I suspect that any inbound links to these removed pages are from low quality scraper-type sites anyway. Thanks in advance!2 -
Why is our page will not being found by google?
Hi, We have a page that went live nearly 2 months ago. https://www.invoicestudio.com/Secure/InvoiceTemplate Why does google not notice it. Both site: URL's return nothing. site:www.invoicestudio.com/Secure/InvoiceTemplate site:www.invoicestudio.com/Secure This is an important page for us and do not understand why google doesn't like it. Hope you can help Thanks Andrew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Studio330 -
Rel canonical on every page, pointing to home page
I've just started working with a client and have been surprised to find that every page of their site (using Concrete5 CMS) has a rel=canonical pointing to their home page. I'm feeling really dumb, because this seems like a fatal flaw which would keep Google from ranking any page other than the home page... but when I look at Google Analytics, Content > Site Content > Landing Pages, using Secondary Dimension = Source, it seems that Google is delivering users to numerous pages on their site. Can anyone help me out?! Thanks very much!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | measurableROI0 -
Links to images on a page diluting page value?
We have been doing some testing with additional images on a page. For example, the page here:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter264
http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/files/2550/sukhoi-su-27-flanker-package-for-fsx/ Notice the images under the heading Images/Screenshots After adding these images, we noticed a ranking drop for that page (-27 places) in the SERPS. Could the large amount of images - in particular the links on the images (links to the larger versions) be causing it to dilute the value of the actual page? Any suggestions, advice or opinions will be much appreciated.0 -
Pages that were ranking now are not?
Hi Folks Noticed something strange just now pages that were ranking on position 10 on Google for searches such as 'ufc trainer kinect best price' at the start of this week are no longer ranking? Is what has happened to the site the famous google dance or sandbox effect as the site only officially went live on Monday If this is the case what is the recommended course of action to get back ranking competitively again? as I have no idea on what has gone wrong as I has always tried to follow best practice from these forums and the SEOMOZ and YOUMOZ articles My site is www.cheapfindergames.com Many Thanks Ian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ocelot0