Access denied in google webmaster tools
-
Hi I have just checked on my google webmaster tools and it is showing i 11 urls that are coming back as access denied. Now the urls are working, and they have been redirected using 301 redirect, so i have done everything right but for some reason google is not able to crawl them.
Does anyone know what i have done wrong for it to come back as access denied and how i can solve this problem. the site is www.in2town.co.uk many thanks
| | | |
| | 2 | Gardening/Gardening-Advice-What-is-Hydroponic-Gardening/menu-id-4991 | 403 | 4/11/13 |
| | 3 | Top-Showbiz-News/Super-Injunctions-Are-Right-Says-Hugh-Grant | 403 | 4/29/13 |
| | 4 | Entertainment-Tonight/Cheryl-Cole-wants-to-spice-up-The-X-Factor | 403 | 4/11/13 |
| | 5 | Tiger-Woods-paid-10000-a-time-for-sex | 403 | 4/20/13 |
| | 6 | Thousands-of-children-hurt-trying-to-stop-arguments-between-adults/Thousands-of-children-hurt-trying-to-stop-arguments-between-adults/menu-id-4448 | 403 | 4/24/13 |
| | 7 | News-Showbiz/Doctor-Who-changed-my-life-says-Matt-Smith | 403 | 4/29/13 |
| | 8 | The-Latest-Health-News/Hypnosis-Hypnotherapy-for-Relationships/menu-id-4744 | 403 | 4/11/13 |
| | 9 | Soap-Gossip-Latest-News/Emmerdale-Marks-bit-on-the-side-comes-to-home-farm/menu-id-4615 | 403 | 4/11/13 |
| | 10 | news/eastenders/ | 403 | 4/11/13 |
| | 11 | entertainment-news/Prince-William-Stag-Do-To-Be-Held-in-Cape-Town | 403 | 3/24/13 || | |
-
cheers for this, i have contacted the company to see what they say about this issue and hopefully it will be resolved.
-
As I said the clue is likely in the message you get from the front end "Forbidden Access (flooding)"
If you search for this, the results all seem to mention joomla and that module. If you look through those results there are some mentions of the security features of this SEF module and how to turn them on/off. It is impossible to say if this is 100% the cause of your issue, but if your hosting company say everything is fine, and the message shown is specific to this joomla module, then it is a likely candidate. All things being equal, try turning off this security feature and see if the access denied errors in GWT go away.
-
just going into my webmaster tools and it says the following
| | Response Code | Detected |
| --- | --- | --- |<colgroup><col style="width: 45px;"><col style="width: 80px;"><col><col style="width: 120px;"><col style="width: 90px;"></colgroup>
| | 1 | Headlines-Celebrity-/Simon-Cowell-The-Wedding-Is-Back-On | 403 | 4/20/13 |
| | 2 | Gardening/Gardening-Advice-What-is-Hydroponic-Gardening/menu-id-4991 | 403 | 4/11/13 |
| | 3 | Top-Showbiz-News/Super-Injunctions-Are-Right-Says-Hugh-Grant | 403 | 4/29/13 |
| | 4 | Entertainment-Tonight/Cheryl-Cole-wants-to-spice-up-The-X-Factor | 403 | 4/11/13 |
| | 5 | Tiger-Woods-paid-10000-a-time-for-sex | 403 | 4/20/13 |
| | 6 | Thousands-of-children-hurt-trying-to-stop-arguments-between-adults/Thousands-of-children-hurt-trying-to-stop-arguments-between-adults/menu-id-4448 | 403 | 4/24/13 |
| | 7 | News-Showbiz/Doctor-Who-changed-my-life-says-Matt-Smith | 403 | 4/29/13 |
| | 8 | The-Latest-Health-News/Hypnosis-Hypnotherapy-for-Relationships/menu-id-4744 | 403 | 4/11/13 |
| | 9 | news/eastenders/ | 403 | 4/11/13 |
| | 10 | entertainment-news/Prince-William-Stag-Do-To-Be-Held-in-Cape-Town | 403 | 3/24/13 ||
when i have looked at more info on this it says the following
Access denied errors
In general, Google discovers content by following links from one page to another. To crawl a page, Googlebot must be able to access it. If you’re seeing unexpected Access Denied errors, it may be for the following reasons:
- 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.)
- Your robots.txt file is blocking Google from accessing your whole site or individual URLs or directories.
- Test that your robots.txt is working as expected. The Test robots.txt tool lets you see exactly how Googlebot will interpret the contents of your robots.txt file. The Google user-agent is Googlebot. (How to verify that a user-agent really is Googlebot.)
- The Fetch as Google tool helps you understand exactly how your site appears to Googlebot. This can be very useful when troubleshooting problems with your site's content or discoverability in search results.
- Your server requires users to authenticate using a proxy, or your hosting provider may be blocking Google from accessing your site.
i have asked my hosting company about this and they say everything is fine.
any help would be great to solve this
| |
-
going to go through these today as they may have changed since the update. so you feel the sh404sef could be causing the blocking problems, i will contact them.
-
Hi Tim,
Well both those urls you give for the 301 are returning a 404, but I don't think they are the cause of your original problem which is the access denied issue. For that I am pretty sure you need to be looking at that joomla SH404SEF module.
-
hi both sides are there, for example from above,
Redirect 301 /Lingerie-Brands-expert-says-Lingerie-improves-your-sex-life /lingerie-helps-improve-your-sex-life
so i have the original page and then pointing to the destination page
i just do not understand after all the checks i have done why the error is happening
-
Hi Tim,
Your robots.txt looks ok from what I can tell. The 301s dont look odd (although what you have there is only one side of them right? I don't see the final page).
I think the clue is the message you get on the front end "Forbidden Access (flooding)". If you search for this phrase you start seeing references to the joomla SH404SEF module. See here for example: http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?p=1368937
I am not a joomla expert, but maybe it is a joomla issue instead of a server one, worth looking into.
-
they have also said my 301 redirects are causing the problems but i thought i had done this correctly
here are some of my redirects
The lines that are causing the issue are:
Redirect 301 /Jennifer-Aniston-upset-over-Brad-Pitt-Marriage /news/have-your-say/jennifer-aniston-upset-over-brad-pitt-marriage
Redirect 301 /In2town-Gossip/Liz-Hurley-Wants-Her-Husband-Back /news/have-your-say/liz-hurley-wants-her-husband-back
Redirect 301 /News-Celebrity/Take-That-and-Robbie-Williams-do-it-again /news/have-your-say/take-that-and-robbie-williams-do-it-again
Redirect 301 /Kevin-McCloud-does-not-like-the-word-Poverty /news/have-your-say/kevin-mccloud-does-not-like-the-word-poverty
Redirect 301 /Latest-Travel-News/Singapore-Tourist-Information-Singapore-a-must-for-Holidays/menu-id-4592 /news/holidays/singapore-tourist-information-singapore-a-must-for-holidays
Redirect 301 /Travel-Articles/Holiday-makers-are-rushing-to-buy-cheap-flights-to-Benidorm/menu-id-4998 /news/flight-news/holiday-makers-are-rushing-to-buy-cheap-flights-to-benidorm
Redirect 301 /The-Latest-Health-News/Stop-Biting-Your-Nails/menu-id-4744 /news/healthy-living/stop-biting-your-nails-with-hypnotherapy
Redirect 301 /Woman-celebrates-after-losing-weight-with-Weight-Loss-Hypnosis /news/gastric-band-hypnotherapy/woman-celebrates-after-losing-weight-with-gastric-band-hypnosis
Redirect 301 /Health-News-/-Stop-Smoking-Hypnosis-really-works-says-expert /news/health/stop-smoking-hypnosis-really-works-says-stop-smoking-expert
Redirect 301 /Animal-Health-News/Pet-Advice-Kennel-Cough-Advice-for-your-Pets/menu-id-4954 /news/dog-care/dog-kennel-cough
Redirect 301 /Travel-News/Flying-to-Australia-consumers-are-turning-their-back-on-Travel-Agents-over-cheap-flights/menu-id-4592 /news/flight-news/flying-to-australia-consumers-turn-their-backs-on-travel-agents-for-cheap-flights-to-australia
Redirect 301 /The-Latest-Health-News/Childbirth-Hypnotherapy/menu-id-4744 /news/health/childbirth-hypnotherapy
Redirect 301 /Travel-News/Brazil-Holidays-is-becoming-a-huge-hit-with-British-Tourist/menu-id-4592 /news/holidays/brazil-holidays-is-becoming-a-huge-hit-with-british-tourist
Redirect 301 /Celebrity-Gossip-Celebrity-News-and-latest-celebrity-gossip /Showbiz-Gossip
Redirect 301 /Latest-Travel-News/Travel-Magazine-reveals-secrets-to-finding-Cheap-Flights /news/flight-news/saving-money-on-flights
Redirect 301 /Lingerie-Brands-expert-says-Lingerie-improves-your-sex-life /lingerie-helps-improve-your-sex-life -
contacted my hosting company and they said the following robots file could be blocking google and causing the 403 errors, i thought it looked standard to me, can anyone please have a look and let me know if my robots file is causing the problem
many thanks
If the Joomla site is installed within a folder such as at
e.g. www.example.com/joomla/ the robots.txt file MUST be
moved to the site root at e.g. www.example.com/robots.txt
AND the joomla folder name MUST be prefixed to the disallowed
path, e.g. the Disallow rule for the /administrator/ folder
MUST be changed to read Disallow: /joomla/administrator/
For more information about the robots.txt standard, see:
http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html
For syntax checking, see:
http://www.sxw.org.uk/computing/robots/check.html
User-agent: *
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /cli/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /logs/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/ -
thank you for this, what would be the best way to solve this, as this must be affecting my rankings
-
Hi Tim,
It looks like you have some sort of server setup that is trying to block dos attacks or similar. If you put your site into screaming frog after the first few pages it starts returning 403 errors (access denied). If you then look at a page in a browser your see the message: Forbidden Access (flooding).
Is it likely that this is happening when google is trying to spider the site also?
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
-
New website - not showing in Google?
This site was launched 3 days ago, bimcosupply.com and I'm trying to get it to show in Google just for a branded search for the moment (Bimco, Bimco Corporation, etc). The old site is still showing in search, bimcoplumbingsupplies.com instead. This site was taken down a while back. I set up a redirect for the domain in cPanel, and also set individual pages to redirect in WordPress on the bimcosupply.com site. I've verified the site in Google Search Console, submitted a sitemap and did URL inspection on each page. Each page is showing as indexed, though now when I search site:bimcosupply.com not all pages are there, and there are two results for the home page, one "https" and one "http." (Before today, all of the pages were showing so not sure what changed). I know this new domain does not have any (or very little) domain authority yet, but I would have thought that the site should display for branded search by now. So I'm concerned that something is wrong with the site, how the redirects are set up, etc. that is preventing it from displaying. Could anyone take a look and help me figure this out please?
Technical SEO | | browncreative0 -
When will all of Google Maps be the same again?
As many of you are aware that the pigeon update was only applied to the new Google maps resulting in very different search results for Google local business. When you search for a business on old Google maps then you get totally different results vs the new Google maps. Some businesses totally disappeared completely from the search results. I have done my research and found out that it's because the new Algo was only applied to the new maps. Also new algo does not apply to other countries. Well the reason I posted this topic is because I have noticed that all the new Google Business listings I am verifying for my clients are all being put under the old Google maps and not the new ones. They come up fine when searching from old maps but not the new ones. I understand Google has not rolled out the pigeon on all data centers but why? Will Google eventually roll out the update to old maps? Since Google is adding businesses to old google maps then what's the point of even adding new listings?
Technical SEO | | bajaseo0 -
Empty Google cached pages.
My little startup Voyage has a tough relationship with Google. I have been reading SEOMOZ/MOZ for years. I am no pro but I understand the basics pretty well. I would like to know why all pages on my main domain look empty in google cache. Here is one example. Other advice is welcome too. I know a lot of my metas and my markup is bad but I am working on it!
Technical SEO | | vincentgagne0 -
De-indexed from Google
Hi Search Experts! We are just launching a new site for a client with a completely new URL. The client can not provide any access details for their existing site. Any ideas how can we get the existing site de-indexed from Google? Thanks guys!
Technical SEO | | rikmon0 -
I have custom 404 page and getting so much 404 error on Google webmaster, what should i do?
I have a custom 404 page with popular post and category links in the page, everyday i have 404 crawl error on webmaster tools, what should i do?
Technical SEO | | rimon56930 -
Google previews meanings
I have noticed that when I do a site:mysite.com search and all my indexed pages come up, that when I hover over the arrows and bring up the previews some of the pages have things in a red rectangle and some of the pages even have zig zag-like tears/perforations running through them. What do these signify?
Technical SEO | | VictorVC0 -
Google Places - need to update
I've got a client who verified their Google Places listing years ago, and noone knows who so I can't access it. The business is now moving and I need to update the address. What should I do? thanks
Technical SEO | | garymeld0 -
Google Shopping Australia/Google Merchant Centre
So Google Shopping has finally landed in Australia so we've got some work todo hooking it up to our client ecom sites. Right now we have a handful of clients who are setup, the feed is getting in their ok but all products are sitting in "disapproved" status in the dashboard and clicking into each individual product the status says awaiting review. I logged a support ticket with Google to get some more info on this as it doesn't look right to me (ie the disapproved status in dashboard) and got a useless templated answer. Seems that if I switch the country destination to US the products are approved and live in google.com shopping search within the hour. Switch back to Australia and they go back to disapproved status. Anyone having the same issue/seen this before? I simply don't trust Google support and wondering if there's other factors at play here.
Technical SEO | | Brendo0