Impact of 401s on Site Rankings
-
Will having 401s on a site negatively impact rankings? (e.g. 401s thrown from a social media sharing icon)
-
Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?
Thanks!
-
So how would you block spiders from crawling social media sharing icons? Or is there another workaround?
-
Yes, I believe any http error response is a bad thing and could affect your ranking. Even 404's or 301's (when links on-site or in sitemap cause them) are cause for concern. You want to make your site as squeaky clean as possible.
I regularly use a site crawler to check my site, including sitemap/rss feeds, and fix any non-200 responses.
-
First here is an error list: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40132
Response code 403 is for requests, where authentication makes no difference, disabled directory browsing.
401 Unauthorized would be the response to send.I'd suggest using robot.txt to stop going to these pages? Or even better, if you can allow Google's spiders access (I'm not 100% sure how this is done)
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
-
Messy older site
I am taking over a website that doesn't have any canonical tags and spotty redirects. It looks like they have http://, https://, www and non-www pages indexed but GA is just set up for the http://non-www home page. Should all versions of the site be set up in GA and Search Console? I think so but wanted to confirm. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | SpodekandCo0 -
Changing .nl to .eu impact on rankings?
Hi all, I have 2 questions concerning the merge of two websites of ours.
Technical SEO | | MarikeP
We would like to combine our .nl and .be website to one big .eu website. Both websites have dutch and english rankings in The Netherlands and Belgium. 1. Will the rankings change because of the domain change to .eu?
2. Will the rankings in both countries change because of the merge? I hope somebody can help me, Greetings0 -
Why is this page not ranking but is indexed?
I have a page http://jobs.hays.co.uk/jobs-in-norfolk and it is indexed by Google but will not show up for any keywords I try. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | S_Curtis0 -
Changing images on site without losing ranking
A number of images on my site rank very well under google image search but need to be replaced with updated versions. If I keep the file name and pixel dimensions identical will switching the image effect my rankings? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Justin450 -
Why does my site rank so badly
its my turn to ask the interminable question why does my site rank so badly? site is: marriagerecords.org.uk. it was #1 for 'marriage records' on google for about 6 months. then it was 5th to 10th for about 2 months. now it is nowhere for this phrase and anything else, none of the pages I have written rank for anything. I have spent hours upon hours researching original content and I have got some great backlinks from sites like wrexham.gov.uk and somerset.gov.uk (some dont show in opensiteexplorer yet). im guessing im over-optimizing something but i'd love some concrete fixes if anyone could suggest any. thanks, tom
Technical SEO | | lethal0r0 -
Site Purchase and 301
Hello, I just started working with a new client. Since then the client has purchased another company. We have re-branded the new companies home page and 301 redirected the rest of the site's links to the corresponding pages on the holding companies site. Since then the rankings have tanked. I looked at both companies back link profiles and realized that they are quite spammy from the last SEO contractor they hired. That said, the site was ranking fine until last Friday. I was wondering if anyone had seen temporary rankings decrease after 301ing a domain to a different site? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | TargetClick0 -
How can I use a keyword based domain to rank for my existing site?
Hi everyone, From my understanding if your keywords are in your domain name it can help you rank for the keyword. My site www.pixelchefs.com was affected from the latest Google Algorithm changes, as I used my main site as a testing ground for all my back linking. Our site was a single page with Jquery slide, late February the same time with the Google algo changes we uploaded our new site, larger site with lots of pages and info. Result of that was that home page has PR3 and all other pages PR0. Well I don't really depend on Google for any work as most of my work comes from referrals.......but While searching for names for my private page I came across the domain name www.DesignOrlando.com, The specific keyword gets 22,210 view per month according to Google analytics and also contains part of the keyword for all the keywords I am after. I want to use the domain name for my main site but i am not sure what is the best way to forward the domain so Google can start reading my site as DesignOrlando.com Any Suggestions will be very appreciated.
Technical SEO | | alex_pixelchefs0 -
Index forum sites
Hi Moz Team, somehow the last question i raised a few days ago not only wasnt answered up until now, it was also completely deleted and the credit was not "refunded" - obviously there was some data loss involved with your restructuring. Can you check whether you still find the last question and answer it quickly? I need the answer 🙂 Here is one more question: I bought a website that has a huge forum, loads of pages with user generated content. Overall around 500.000 Threads with 9 Million comments. The complete forum is noindex/nofollow when i bought the site, now i am thinking about what is the best way to unleash the potential. The current system is vBulletin 3.6.10. a) Shall i first do an update of vbulletin to version 4 and use the vSEO tool to make the URLs clean, more user and search engine friendly before i switch to index/follow? b) would you recommend to have the forum in the folder structure or on a subdomain? As far as i know subdomain does take lesser strenght from the TLD, however, it is safer because the subdomain is seen as a separate entity from the regular TLD. Having it in he folder makes it easiert to pass strenght from the TLD to the forum, however, it puts my TLD at risk c) Would you release all forum sites at once or section by section? I think section by section looks rather unnatural not only to search engines but also to users, however, i am afraid of blasting more than a millionpages into the index at once. d) Would you index the first page of a threat or all pages of a threat? I fear duplicate content as the different pages of the threat contain different body content but the same Title and possibly the same h1. Looking forward to hear from you soon! Best Fabian
Technical SEO | | fabiank0