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.
Subdomain 403 error
-
Hi Everyone,
A crawler from our SEO tool detects a 403 error from a link from our main domain to a a couple of subdomains. However, these subdomains are perfect accessibly. What could be the problem? Is this error caused by the server, the crawlbot or something else?
I would love to hear your thoughts.
Jens -
no at all
-
Hi Roman,
Thanks for your answer!
It's a commercial tool.
I checked the robots.txt file and .htaccess, but didn't saw any problems.
As you say, the problem can just be caused by the user-agent.If so, this will not affect my SEO efforts, right?
-
Which tool are you using is this a custom tool or commercial tool such as Screamingfrog?
-
These are all for client errors. That means the page wasn’t found and something is wrong with the request. Whatever is happening though, the issue is typically on the client side:
403: Forbidden, So In your case, the first place that you need to check is your .htaccess and your Robots.txt file and make sure that they are not blocking any crawler or at least the crawler of your tools.
For example, some Hosting providers block all the crawlers that are not Google or Bing to save resources. So is usual that Roger (Moz Crawler) has problems to crawl a page that is blocked on the server side. Usually, Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush has this kind of problem so in summary
- Make sure your .htaccess and your Robots.txt is not blocking your crawler
- Make sure your hosting is not blocking your crawler
- If all the above does not work try to modify the user-agent of your tool
Hope this info helps you with your problem
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
-
520 Error from crawl report with Cloudflare
I am getting a lot of 520 Server Error in crawl reports. I see this is related to Cloudflare. We know 520 is Cloudflare so maybe the Moz team can change this from "unknown" to "Cloudflare 520". Perhaps the Moz team can update the "how to fix" section in the reporting, if they have some possible suggestions on how to avoid seeing these in the report of if there is a real issue that needs to be addressed. At this point I don't know. There must be a solution that Moz can provide like a setting in Cloudflare that will permit the Rogerbot if Cloudflare is blocking it because it does not like its behavior or something. It could be that Rogerbot is crawling my site on a bad day or at a time when we were deploying a massive site change. If I know when my site will be down can I pause Rogerbot? I found this https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/troubleshooting/general-troubleshooting/troubleshooting-crawl-errors/
Technical SEO | | awilliams_kingston0 -
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or postively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please?
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or positively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please? For example at the bottom of this blog post https://www.poppyandperle.com/post/face-painting-a-global-language the hashtags are linked, but they don't go to a page, they go to search results of all other blogs using that hashtag. Seems a bit of a strange approach to me.
Technical SEO | | Mediaholix0 -
Search Console Errors 400 and 405
Hi, Does anyone know if search console errors showing as follows are damaging to serps: /xmlrpc.php is returning 405 error /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php is returning 400 error These errors seem to of coincided almost to the day that there was a ranking drop for the primary keyword from mid page 1 to bottom of page 2. No matter what I do I cannot seem to correct these errors. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | DaleZon0 -
Find all external 404 errors/links?
Hi All, We have recently discovered a site was linking to our site but it was linking to an incorrect url, resulting in a 404 error. We had only found this by pure chance and wondered if there was a tool out there that will tell us when a site is linking to an incorrect url on our site? Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Some URLs were not accessible to Googlebot due to an HTTP status error.
Hello I'm a seo newbie and some help from the community here would be greatly appreciated. I have submitted the sitemap of my website in google webmasters tools and now I got this warning: "When we tested a sample of the URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs were not accessible to Googlebot due to an HTTP status error. All accessible URLs will still be submitted." How do I fix this? What should I do? Many thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | GoldenRanking140 -
How big is the problem: 404-errors as result of out of stock products?
We had a discussion about the importance of 404-errors as result of products which are out of stock. Of course this is not good, but what is the leverance in terms of importance: low-medium-high?
Technical SEO | | Digital-DMG0 -
No index on subdomains
Hi, We have a subdomain that is appearing in the search results - I want to hide this as it looks really bad. If I were to add the no index tag to the sub domain would URL would this affect the whole domain or just that sub domain? The main domain is vitally important - it is just that sub domain I need to hide. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | Creditsafe0 -
404 errors on non-existent URLs
Hey guys and gals, First Moz Q&A for me and really looking forward to being part of the community. I hope as my first question this isn't a stupid one but I was just struggling to find any resource that dealt with the issue and am just looking for some general advice. Basically a client has raised a problem with 404 error pages - or the lack thereof- on non-existent URLs on their site; let's say for example: 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels/asdfas' Obviously content never existed on this page so its not like you're saying 'hey, sorry this isn't here anymore'; its more like- 'there was never anything here in the first place'. Currently in this fictitious example typing in 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels/asdfas**'** returns the same content as the 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels' page which I appreciate isn't ideal. What I was wondering is how far do you take this issue- I've seen examples here on the seomoz site where you can edit the URI in a similar manner and it returns the same content as the parent page but with the alternate address. Should 404's be added across all folders on a site in a similar way? How often would this scenario be and issue particularly for internal pages two or three clicks down? I suppose unless someone linked to a page with a misspelled URL... Also would it be worth placing 301 redirects on a small number of common mis-spellings or typos e.g. 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towles' to the correct URLs as opposed to just 404s? Many thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | AJ2340