Huge spike in "access denied" in search console
-
Hey Guys,
We have seen a huge spike in "Access Denied" status in the google search console for our website and I have no idea why that would be the case. Is there anyone that can shed some light on what is going on or who can point me in the direction of an SEO specialist that we can pay to fix the issue??
Thanks
-
Thanks!
-
Hi,
Access denied means Googlebot can’t crawl the page. Unlike a 404, Googlebot is prevented from crawling the page in the first place.
To know about access denied in detail please check section C here @ https://moz.com/blog/how-to-fix-crawl-errors-in-google-search-console
Hope this helps.
Thanks
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
-
Subdirectory site / 301 Redirects / Google Search Console
Hi There, I'm a web developer working on an existing WordPress site (Site #1) that has 900 blog posts accessible from this URL structure: www.site-1.com/title-of-the-post We've built a new website for their content (Site #2) and programmatically moved all blog posts to the second website. Here is the URL structure: www.site-1.com/site-2/title-of-the-post Site #1 will remain as a normal company site without a blog, and Site #2 will act as an online content membership platform. The original 900 posts have great link juice that we, of course, would like to maintain. We've already set up 301 redirects that take care of this process. (ie. the original post gets redirected to the same URL slug with '/site-2/' added. My questions: Do you have a recommendation about how to best handle this second website in Google Search Console? Do we submit this second website as an additional property in GSC? (which shares the same top-level-domain as the original) Currently, the sitemap.xml submitted to Google Search Console has all 900 blog posts with the old URLs. Is there any benefit / drawback to submitting another sitemap.xml from the new website which has all the same blog posts at the new URL. Your guidance is greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HimalayanInstitute0 -
Scary bug in search console: All our pages reported as being blocked by robots.txt after https migration
We just migrated to https and created 2 days ago a new property in search console for the https domain. Webmaster Tools account for the https domain now shows for every page in our sitemap the warning: "Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt."Also in the dashboard of the search console it shows a red triangle with warning that our root domain would be blocked by robots.txt. 1) When I test the URLs in search console robots.txt test tool all looks fine.2) When I fetch as google and render the page it renders and indexes without problem (would not if it was really blocked in robots.txt)3) We temporarily completely emptied the robots.txt, submitted it in search console and uploaded sitemap again and same warnings even though no robots.txt was online4) We run screaming frog crawl on whole website and it indicates that there is no page blocked by robots.txt5) We carefully revised the whole robots.txt and it does not contain any row that blocks relevant content on our site or our root domain. (same robots.txt was online for last decade in http version without problem)6) In big webmaster tools I could upload the sitemap and so far no error reported.7) we resubmitted sitemaps and same issue8) I see our root domain already with https in google SERPThe site is https://www.languagecourse.netSince the site has significant traffic, if google would really interpret for any reason that our site is blocked by robots we will be in serious trouble.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
This is really scary, so even if it is just a bug in search console and does not affect crawling of the site, it would be great if someone from google could have a look into the reason for this since for a site owner this really can increase cortisol to unhealthy levels.Anybody ever experienced the same problem?Anybody has an idea where we could report/post this issue?0 -
Nofollow "print" URLs?
Hi there, Apols for the basic question but is it considered good practice to nofollow one of one's own URLs? Basically our 'print page' command produces an identical URL in the same window but with .../?print=1 at the end. As far as I've been reading, the nofollow html attribute is, broadly speaking, only for links to external websites you don't want to vouch for or internal links to login/register pages that together with noindex, you're asking Google not to waste crawl budget on. (The print page is already noindexed so we're good there) Can anyone confirm the above from their own experience? Thanks so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daft.ie0 -
Strange 404s in GWT - "Linked From" pages that never existed
I’m having an issue with Google Webmaster Tools saying there are 404 errors on my site. When I look into my “Not Found” errors I see URLs like this one: Real-Estate-1/Rentals-Wanted-228/Myrtle-Beach-202/subcatsubc/ When I click on that and go to the “Linked From” tab, GWT says the page is being linked from http://www.myrtlebeach.com/Real-Estate-1/Rentals-Wanted-228/Myrtle-Beach-202/subcatsubc/ The problem here is that page has never existed on myrtlebeach.com, making it impossible for anything to be “linked from” that page. Many more strange URLs like this one are also showing as 404 errors. All of these contain “subcatsubc” somewhere in the URL. My Question: If that page has never existed on myrtlebeach.com, how is it possible to be linking to itself and causing a 404?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fuel0 -
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
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NileCruises0 -
Is there a way to stop my product pages with the "show all" catagory/attribute from duplicating content?
If there were less pages with the "show all" attribute it would be a simple fix by adding the canonical URL tag. But seeing that there are about 1,000 of them I was wondering if their was a broader fix that I could apply.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cscoville0 -
Should product searches (on site searches) be noindex?
We have a large new site that is suffering from a sitewide panda like penalty. The site has 200k pages indexed by Google. Lots of category and sub category page content and about 25% of the product pages have unique content hand written (vs the other pages using copied content). So it seems our site is labeled as thin. I'm wondering about using noindex paramaters for the internal site search. We have a canonical tag on search results pointing to domain.com/search/ (client thought that would help) but I'm wondering if we need to just no index all the product search results. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0 -
Pay on Organic Search Results
Are there companies out there that accept payment on the results they get for organic search listings? I have a site that I want to be number 1 for two terms on Google UK and .com and I while I dont think it will take much effort I would like to find a decent SEO company or person that can do this and be paid for the result. What do people think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | clayts0