Access Denied
-
Our website which was ranking at number 1 in Google.co.uk for our 2 main search terms for over three years was hacked into last November. We rebuilt the site but had slipped down to number 4. We were hacked again 2 weeks ago and are now at number 7.
I realise that this drop may not be just a result of the hacking but it cant' have helped.
I've just access our Google Webmaster Tools accounts and these are the current results:
940 Access Denied Errors
197 Not Found
The 940 Access Denied Errors apply to Wordpress Blog pages.
Is it likely that the hacking caused the Access Denied errors and is there a clear way to repair these errors?
Any advice would be very welcome.
Thanks,
Colin
-
Glad I could help!
-
Thanks so much Jason. I'll take a look right now and be back with a Thumbs Up I'm sure.
Colin
-
Hi Nile
I've found this for you: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2409441
It summarizes why access denied shows up.
My initial thought was that your robots.txt file was maliciously updated to block many of your pages.
-
Hi Jason,
I can visit those pages in Google browser.
Colin
-
A little more information needed here... can you visit those pages in your browser? If not, what error shows up?
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
-
Why do SEO agencies ask for access to our Google Search Console and Google Tag Manager?
What do they need GTM for? And what is the use case for setting up Google Search Console?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NBJ_SM0 -
Optimizing A Homepage URL That Is Only Accessible To Logged In Users
I have a client who has a very old site with lots and lots of links to it. The site offers www.examplesite.com/loggedin as the homepage to logged in users. So, once you're logged in, you can't get back to examplesite.com anymore (unless you log out) and are instead given /loggedin as your new personalized homepage. The problem is that many users over time who linked to the site linked to the site they saw after they signed up and were logged in.... www.examplesite.com/loggedin. So, there's all these inbound links going to a page that is inaccessible to non-logged-in users. Thus linking to nowheresville. One idea is to fire off a 301 to non-logged in users, forwarding them to the homepage. Thus capturing much of that stranded link juice. Honestly, I'm not 100% sure you can fire off a server code conditioned on if they are logged in or not. I imagine you can, but don't know that for a technical fact. Another idea is to offer some content on /loggedin that is right now mostly currently blank, except for an offer to sign in. Which do you think is better and why? Thanks... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Domain switch planned - new domain accessible - until the switch: redirect from new to old domain with 307?
Hi there, We are going to switch our local domain oldsite.at to newsite.com in November. As our IT department wants to use the newsite.com already for email traffic till then, the domain newsite.com has to be accessible for public and currently shows the default Apache page without useful content. The old domain has quite some trust, the new domain is a first time registered domain (not known by search engines yet and no published anyhow). The domain was parked till now. I am aware of the steps to take for the switch itself, but: **what to do with the newsite.com domain until everything is prepared for the switch? **I suppose users or search engines find the domain and as there is no useful information available it harms us already. My idea was to 307 redirect newsite.com to the oldsite.at but the concern is that this causes problems as soon as we switch the domain and redirecting with 301 from oldsite.at to newsite.com? Do you have any objections or other recommendations? Thank you a lot in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | comicron0 -
Why are "noindex" pages access denied errors in GWT and should I worry about it?
GWT calls pages that have "noindex, follow" tags "access denied errors." How is it an "error" to say, "hey, don't include these in your index, but go ahead and crawl them." These pages are thin content/duplicate content/overly templated pages I inherited and the noindex, follow tags are an effort to not crap up Google's view of this site. The reason I ask is that GWT's detection of a rash of these access restricted errors coincides with a drop in organic traffic. Of course, coincidence is not necessarily cause. Should I worry about it and do something or not? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Https Homepage Redirect & Issue with Googlebot Access
Hi All, I have a question about Google correctly accessing a site that has a 301 redirect to https on the homepage. Here’s an overview of the situation and I’d really appreciate any insight from the community on what the issue might be: Background Info:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | G.Anderson
My homepage is set up as a 301 redirect to a https version of the homepage (some users log in so we need the SSL). Only 2 pages on the site are under SSL and the rest of the site is http. We switched to the SSL in July but have not seen any change in our rankings despite efforts increasing backlinks and out put of content. Even though Google has indexed the SSL page of the site, it appears that it is not linking up the SSL page with the rest of the site in its search and tracking. Why do we think this is the case? The Diagnosis: 1) When we do a Google Fetch on our http homepage, it appears that Google is only reading the 301 redirect instructions (as shown below) and is not finding its way over to the SSL page which has all the correct Page Title and meta information. <code>HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Date: Fri, 08 Nov 2013 17:26:24 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.16 (Debian) Location: https://mysite.com/ Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Length: 242 Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 <title>301 Moved Permanently</title> # Moved Permanently The document has moved [here](https://mysite.com/). * * * <address>Apache/2.2.16 (Debian) Server at mysite.com</address></code> 2) When we view a list of external backlinks to our homepage, it appears that the backlinks that have been built after we switched to the SSL homepage have been separated from the backlinks built before the SSL. Even on Open Site, we are only seeing the backlinks that were achieved before we switched to the SSL and not getting to track any backlinks that have been added after the SSL switch. This leads up to believe that the new links are not adding any value to our search rankings. 3) When viewing Google Webmaster, we are receiving no information about our homepage, only all the non-https pages. I added a https account to Google Webmaster and in that version we ONLY receive the information about our homepage (and the other ssl page on the site) What Is The Problem? My concern is that we need to do something specific with our sitemap or with the 301 redirect itself in order for Google to read the whole site as one entity and receive the reporting/backlinks as one site. Again, google is indexing all of our pages but it seems to be doing so in a disjointed way that is breaking down link juice and value being built up by our SSL homepage. Can anybody help? Thank you for any advice input you might be able to offer. -Greg0 -
Googlebot Can't Access My Sites After I Repair My Robots File
Hello Mozzers, A colleague and I have been collectively managing about 12 brands for the past several months and we have recently received a number of messages in the sites' webmaster tools instructing us that 'Googlebot was not able to access our site due to some errors with our robots.txt file' My colleague and I, in turn, created new robots.txt files with the intention of preventing the spider from crawling our 'cgi-bin' directory as follows: User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ After creating the robots and manually re-submitting it in Webmaster Tools (and receiving the green checkbox), I received the same message about Googlebot not being able to access the site, only difference being that this time it was for a different site that I manage. I repeated the process and everything, aesthetically looked correct, however, I continued receiving these messages for each of the other sites I manage on a daily-basis for roughly a 10-day period. Do any of you know why I may be receiving this error? is it not possible for me to block the Googlebot from crawling the 'cgi-bin'? Any and all advice/insight is very much welcome, I hope I'm being descriptive enough!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NiallSmith1 -
Access denied errors in webmaster tools
I notice today Ihave 2 access denied errors. I checked the help which says: Googlebot couldn’t access a URL on your site because your site requires users to log in to view all or some of your content. (Tip: You can get around this by removing this requirement for user-agent Googlebot.) Therefore I think it may be because I have added a login page for users and googlebot can't access it. I'm using wordpress and presume I need to amend the robots.txt to remove the requirement for google to log in but how do I do that? Unless I'm misunderstanding the problem altogether!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Wordpress access denied
In Google Webmaster tools after doing a Google Fetch for our Blog which is showing Access Denied for 900+ pages this is the report that comes up and I wonder if this is causing the 900+ pages to show "Access Denied" and if so how to rectify it? The page seems to redirect to itself. This may result in an infinite redirect loop. Please check the Help Center article about redirects.```
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NileCruises
<code>HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Location: http://nile-cruises-4u.co.uk/blog/
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Thu, 05 Jul 2012 07:04:05 GMT
Content-Length: 157 <title>Document Moved</title> Object Moved This document may be found here I</code>0