Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Turn SEO data into actionable Content Briefs
      Moz Pro

      Turn SEO data into actionable Content Briefs

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Do 403 Forbidden errors from website pages hurt rankings?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Do 403 Forbidden errors from website pages hurt rankings?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    6
    7647
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • vtmoz
      vtmoz last edited by

      Hi All,

      I noticed that our website has lot of 403 errors across different pages using the tool http://www.deadlinkchecker.com/. Do these errors hurt website rankings?

      Thanks

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • OlegKorneitchouk
        OlegKorneitchouk @vtmoz last edited by

        You should remove it if possible. No reason to link to a dead link (poor ux, waste crawler time) or call a non-existent resource (slow site down).

        However, I don't think it will make any noticeable effect on your rankings.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • vtmoz
          vtmoz @OlegKorneitchouk last edited by

          Hi Oleg,

          Thanks for the response. This error is limited to one of the links from every page of our website.

          I mean the below link has been repeated across all pages of our website which is been returning as 403 forbidden technically.

          https://d2jbzoiok12mw2.cloudfront.net/wp-json/oembed/1.0/embed?url

          Will these hurt or we can ignore?

          OlegKorneitchouk 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • OlegKorneitchouk
            OlegKorneitchouk last edited by

            Google's official stance is that it's no big deal. They'll simply won't rank those URLs (so if you are getting 403s for pages you want to rank, that's an issue).

            However, if those 403's have external backlinks, I'd redirect them to a similar live page on your site to not lose those links. I also prefer to not waste crawler time visiting non-existent pages so if its easy to do, I'd minimize the number of 403 response codes on the site.

            You sample 403 looks like an offsite CDN which shouldn't hurt, but it is taking up unnecessary resources. No reason not to remove.

            vtmoz 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • vtmoz
              vtmoz @Alick300 last edited by

              Hi,

              Can you please confirm whether below kind of links hurt which are technically 403.

              https://d2jbzoiok12mw2.cloudfront.net/wp-json/oembed/1.0/embed?url

              Thanks

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • Alick300
                Alick300 last edited by

                Hi,

                If you are getting 403 forbidden access response for important page/pages e.g home page/important categories pages  then that may be a problem.

                Thanks

                vtmoz 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                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.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • Neverstop123

                  PDF ranking higher than HTML pages, solution?

                  Hello Moz community I know this question has been asked before but it seems there is no real answer other than putting a summary of the PDF on the HTML page. My problem is other websites are using my PDFs, I have some PDFs with very high authority links and I would like to either pass the link juice on to my product/category page or do rel=canonical somehow. I'm using bigcommerce as my platform. My website is cwwltd.com. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Neverstop123
                  1
                • Raymondlee

                  Why some websites can rank the keywords they don't have in the page?

                  Hello guys, Yesterday, I used SEMrush to search for the keyword "branding agency" to see the SERP. The Liquidagency ranks 5th on the first page. So I went to their homepage but saw no exact keywords "branding agency", even in the page source. Also, I didn't see "branding agency" as a top anchor text in the external links to the page (from the report of SEMrush). I am an SEO newbie, can someone explain this to me, please? Thank you.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Raymondlee
                  0
                • CayenneRed89

                  Help! The website ranks fine but one of my web pages simply won't rank on Google!!!

                  One of our web pages will not rank on Google.  The website as a whole ranks fine except just one section...We have tested and it looks fine...Google can crawl the page no problem.   There are no spurious redirects in place. The content is fine.  There is no duplicate page content issue.  The page has a dozen product images (photos) but the load time of the page is absolutely fine.  We have the submitted the page via webmaster and its fine.  It gets listed but then a few hours later disappears!!!  The site has not been penalised as we get good rankings with other pages.  Can anyone help?  Know about this problem?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed89
                  0
                • bondhoward

                  Google indexed wrong pages of my website.

                  When I google site:www.ayurjeewan.com, after 8 pages, google shows Slider and shop pages. Which I don't want to be indexed. How can I get rid of these pages?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward
                  0
                • sandeep.clickdesk

                  My website is not ranking for primary keywords in Google

                  I need help regarding some SEO strategy that need to be implemented to my website http://goo.gl/AiOgu1 . My website is a leading live chat product, daily it receives around 2000 unique visitors. Initially the website was impacted by manual link penalty, I cleaned up lot of backlinks, the website revoked from the penalty some where around June'14. Most of the secondary and longtail Keywords started ranking in Google, but unfortunately, it do not rank well for the primary keywords like (live chat, live chat software, helpdesk etc). Since I have done lot of onsite changes and even revamped the content but till now I dont find any improvement. I am unable to understand where I have got structed.
                  can anyone help me out?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sandeep.clickdesk
                  0
                • RosemaryB

                  Should we 301 redirect old events pages on a website?

                  We have a client that has an events category section that is filled to the brim with past events webpages.  Another issue is that these old events webpages all contain duplicate meta description tags, so we are concerned that Google might be penalizing our client's website for this issue.   Our client does not want to create specialized meta description tags for these old events pages. Would it be a good idea to 301 redirect these old events landing pages to the main events category page to pass off link equity & remove the duplicate meta description tag issue?   This seems drastic (we even noticed that searchmarketingexpo.com is keeping their old events pages).  However it seems like these old events webpages offer little value to our website visitors. Any feedback would be much appreciated.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB
                  0
                • digisavvy

                  There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?

                  Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy
                  0
                • Townpages

                  Culling 99% of a website's pages. Will this cause irreparable damage?

                  I have a large travel site that has over 140,000 pages. The problem I have is that the majority of pages are filled with dupe content. When Panda came in, our rankings were obliterated, so I am trying to isolate the unique content on the site and go forward with that. The problem is, the site has been going for over 10 years, with every man and his dog copying content from it. It seems that our travel guides have been largely left untouched and are the only unique content that I can find. We have 1000 travel guides in total. My first question is, would reducing 140,000 pages to just 1,000 ruin the site's authority in any way? The site does use internal linking within these pages, so culling them will remove thousands of internal links throughout the site. Also, am I right in saying that the link juice should now move to the more important pages with unique content, if redirects are set up correctly? And finally, how would you go about redirecting all theses pages? I will be culling a huge amount of hotel pages, would you consider redirecting all of these to the generic hotels page of the site? Thanks for your time, I know this is quite a long one, Nick

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Townpages
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.