Understanding how to fix a 403 issue with my website
-
Hi guys, I hope you can help solve a mystery for me!
My site FranceForFamilies.com has been around for 9 years and has always ranked well - at least until I launched a new Wordpress version earlier this year.
The purpose of the relaunch was to improve the look of the site, so I kept the content and meta titles the same but created a new design.
However, from the day of the new launch the search engine rankings have plummeted, to the point where most seem to have disappeared all together.
I have found that when Moz crawls the site, it only crawls one page.
I asked the Moz team about this and they said that the site is returning a 403. They also tested this using a curl and received a 406 response:
- curl -I www.franceforfamilies.com/
- HTTP/1.1 406 Not Acceptable
However, when I check our Google Webmaster tools I can't recreate the issue.
I don't really know what is going on, and I don't have the technical knowledge to solve this - can you help?
Thanks, Daniel
-
Thanks Lesley, I'll take a look at this and report back.
Best, Dan
-
Thanks Oscar, I'll take a look. However my issue is that I know what the problem is, but I don't know how to fix it.
-
Those two errors are generally generated by mod_security. Can you check to see if it is enabled on your server. If it is disable it and see if you still get the error.
-
Hello there,
I would suggest you to crawl your site with Screaming Frog, it will give you very detailed information about your site and it is very very helpful especially with this sort of errors/problems.
Good luck
Oscar
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
-
How I can improve my website On page and Off page
My Website is guitarcontrol.com, I have very strong competition in market. Please advice me the list of improvements on my websites. In regarding ON page, Linkbuiding and Social media. What I can do to improve my website ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zoe.wilson170 -
Is This Worth Fixing?
Hi, I'm working on a site that was last optimized some years ago. It has a fair number of pages that the url, h1, title tag and image alt exact match. Although this comes back as A+ in Moz's on page grader, it seems a bit much. What do you think, is all this too heavy an SEO fingerprint for Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Google Mobile algo traffic issue?
Hello, I have just been approach by a website owner - site isn't mobile friendly in any way - and they've seen a significant fall off in traffic since 23 Jan... backlink profile is clean (and no linkbuilding undertaken) - nothing else has changed... - more than half their traffic is via mobile devices and they've lost a good 1/3 of their traffic - and drilling deeper it's their organic traffic that's been hit. Anybody else seeing similar? edit... for reference: https://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/google-released-mobile-algorithm-think.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Duplicate Content Issues :(
I am wondering how we can solve our duplicate content issues. Here is the thing: There are so many ways you can write a description about a used watch. http://beckertime.com/product/mens-rolex-air-king-no-date-stainless-steel-watch-wsilver-dial-5500/ http://beckertime.com/product/mens-rolex-air-king-stainless-steel-date-watch-wblue-dial-5500/ Whats different between these two? The dial color. We have a lot of the same model numbers but with different conditions, dial colors, and bands.. What ideas do you have?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KingRosales0 -
Links on My website
I am looking to create some more trust on my website by subscribing to BBB. I have heard that my site is penalized and loses "link juice" if I place the BBB logo link in my page footer on every page of my website. Does anyone know how much I am penalized? Should I only put it on my conversion pages and maybe my main 10 sub pages? My main goal is to assist in getting conversions but I don't want to do it at the expense of getting a penalty. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you, Boo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
How does a competing website with clearly black hat style SEO tactics, have a far higher domain authority than our website that only uses legitimate link building tactics?
Through SEO Moz link analysis tools, we looked at a competing websites external followed links and discovered a large number of links going to Blog pages with domain authorities in the 90's (their blog page authorities were between 40 and 60), however the single blog post written by this website was exactly the same in every instance and had been posted in August 2011. Some of these blog sites had 160 or so links linking back to this competing website whose domain authority is 49 while ours is 28, their Moz Trust is 5.43 while ours is 5.18. An example of some of the blogs that link to the competing website are: http://advocacy.mit.edu/coulter/blog/?p=13 http://pest-control-termite-inspection.posterous.com/\ However many of these links are "no follow" and yet still show up on Open Site Explorer as some of this competing websites top linking pages. Admittedly, they have 584 linking root domains while we have only 35, but if most of them are the kind of websites posted above, we don't understand how Google is rewarding them with a higher domain authority. Our website is www.anteater.com.au Are these tactics now the only way to get ahead?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter.Huxley590 -
Could this URL issue be affecting our rankings?
Hi everyone, I have been building links to a site for a while now and we're struggling to get page 1 results for their desired keywords. We're wondering if a web development / URL structure issue could be to blame in what's holding it back. The way the site's been built means that there's a 'false' 1st-level in the URL structure. We're building deeplinks to the following page: www.example.com/blue-widgets/blue-widget-overview However, if you chop off the 2nd-level, you're not given a category page, it's a 404: www.example.com/blue-widgets/ - [Brings up a 404] I'm assuming the web developer built the site and URL structure this way just for the purposes of getting additional keywords in the URL. What's worse is that there is very little consistency across other products/services. Other pages/URLs include: www.example.com/green-widgets/widgets-in-green www.example.com/red-widgets/red-widget-intro-page www.example.com/yellow-widgets/yellow-widgets I'm wondering if Google is aware of these 'false' pages* and if so, if we should advise the client to change the URLs and therefore the URL structure of the website. This is bearing in mind that these pages haven't been linked to (because they don't exist) and therefore aren't being indexed by Google. I'm just wondering if Google can determine good/bad URL etiquette based on other parts of the URL, i.e. the fact that that middle bit doesn't exist. As a matter of fact, my colleague Steve asked this question on a blog post that Dr. Pete had written. Here's a link to Steve's comment - there are 2 replies below, one of which argues that this has no implication whatsoever. However, 5 months on, it's still an issue for us so it has me wondering... Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gmorgan0 -
Why would the PageRank for all of our websites show the same?
The last time I checked (early this year), the PageRank on the sites I manage varied, with the highest showing as 6. It made sense as the PR6 site has loads of links and has been around for a long time, whereas the other sites hadn't. Now all of our websites are showing the same PageRank - 6, even one that has recently launched and another that has barely any links/traffic or anything to it. I didn't check the PR of that one last time (I'd be surprised if it was 2), but the sites now showing as 6 ranged from PR3 to PR6 back then. We changed server in February...so could this issue be something to do with all of the sites being stored on the same server? It doesn't seem right but it's the only thing I can think of. At the moment, the Domain Authority for these six websites ranges from 27 to 62.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0