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
-
Rankings Dropped to Nothing
We're kind of in crisis mode, as our ad revenue is about to take a huge hit. Hoping someone can help me figure out what to do next. Site: https://indoorgardening.com Here's what I did (below) that I think broke things somehow. I'm clearly not an SEO expert but thought I was making things better. And things did improve over the last week or so but then fell apart 2 days ago. 1. Most posts did not have a Yoast focus keyword. I added keyword phrases and used Yoast suggestions to optimize for that and for readability. 2. In some cases I changed post titles to better reflect the keyword phrase. 3. In some cases I changed the slug per Yoast's suggestion and did a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one. 4. I used Grammarly to fix all spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. 5. Some Yoast-suggested changes that were made: Image alt tags, subheading structures, adding keyword to subheadings, first paragraph, and meta description, changed sentence length for those over 20 words to clean up the text, added transition words where applicable, reworded passive voice sentences, added internal links when needed, eliminated consecutive sentences (first word), improved Flesch reading ease when necessary. 6. I also added or changed Amazon affiliate links where needed and swapped out images when necessary. Results:
Technical SEO | | Jbyron
I started this project about 3 weeks ago. On 11/29 we had one of our highest traffic days, with 1017 hits coming from Google. On 11/30, 257 hits came from Google, and on 12/1, 3 (three!!) hits came from Google. At this point, 82 of 89 posts have a double green "Good" score in Yoast; 6 are "OK" and 1 does not have a focus keyword designated. Thanks in advance for any help anyone can provide. -John0 -
Page Rank Flow
I wonder if someone can help me understand clearly page rank flow. If we have a website with a Home page, Services, About and Contact as a very basic website and the page rank will flow to each of those pages from the Home page (i'm not including internal linking between pages or anchor text from the home page content - this is a question purely about home page flow via the main navigation). If the Services page had 3 drop down pages. Would the home page rank also flow to each of these or is it going to the Services page which then distributes it to the three drop down. So instead of Home page rank flowing to 3 pages 33% each - it is flowing to 6 pages 16.6% each. Or is it flowing to 3 pages - 33.3% then the Services pages get a third of 33.3% ->10.1% I know this is simplifying it all a great deal- but it is the basic concept I am trying to grasp on this simple example. Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Redirecting old html site to new wordpress site
Hi I'm currently updating an old (8 years old) html site to wordpress and about a month ago I redirected some url's to the new site (which is in a directory) like this... Redirect 301 /article1.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article1/
Technical SEO | | briandee
Redirect 301 /article2.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article2/
Redirect 301 /article3.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article3/ Google has indexed these new url's and they are showing in search results. I'm almost finished the new version of site and it is currently in a directory /wordpress I intend to move all the files from the directory to the root so new url when this is done will be http://mysite.net/article1/ etc My question is - what to I do about the redirects which are in place - do I delete them and replace with something like this? Redirect 301 /wordpress/article1/ http://mysite.net/article1/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article2/ http://mysite.net/article2/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article3/ http://mysite.net/article3/ Appreciate any help with this0 -
My site is not being regularly crawled?
My site used to be crawled regularly, but not anymore. My pages aren't showing up in the index months after they've been up. I've added them to the sitemap and everything. I now have to submit them through webmaster tools to get them to index. And then they don't really rank? Before you go spouting off the standard SEO resolutions... Yes, I checked for crawl errors on Google Webmaster and no, there aren't any issues No, the pages are not noindex. These pages are index,follow No, the pages are not canonical No, the robots.txt does not block any of these pages No, there is nothing funky going on in my .htaccess. The pages load fine No, I don't have any URL parameters set What else would be interfereing? Here is one of the URLs that wasn't crawled for over a month: http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-st-louis
Technical SEO | | howlusa0 -
Will training videos available on the "members only" section of a site contribute to the sites ranking?
Hello, I got asked a question recently as to whether training videos on the deeper pages of a website (that you can only access if you are a member and log in) will help with the sites ranking. On the SEOMoz software these deeper pages have been crawled as far as I can tell with errors reported on pages from the "members only" section of the site, leading me to believe the members only pages and their content will contribute to the sites overall ranking profile. I have suggested uploading the informational videos on the main pages of the site for now, making them accessible to all visitors and putting them in a more obvious place to encourage more sharing and views, however I've also said I would check it out with some experts so any information will be greatly appreciated! Many thanks 🙂 Charlotte
Technical SEO | | CharlotteWaller0 -
Young site trying hard, but banging head against the wall -- Site Review
Hi All New to PRO but we're seriously committed to getting this working. And firstly thank you to anyone who offers any useful thoughts and insights. We've launched a new site, unfortunately late to the market for the season and are really struggling to get search engine recognition. Site: http://www.ignitehats.co.uk/ We're continuously adding new content, slowly gathering more links and working hard to promote socially. But even on our clearest search terms like "Ignite hats" we're down on page 4. Both GWT and the Seomoz tools highlight no big problems (a few titles that are too long) but otherwise nothing. Maybe wrongly we requested that the Google spam team review our site incase it was being penalised, but got a template response saying the site was not in their spam system (phew, there wasn't a reason it should be we believe). We're wondering if this is just that our site is just too young? It's been live for 6 weeks. But worry maybe this is not the case. We've had success with another site we run much sooner than this. Any help or pointers would be really appreciated. Similar stories and what others have done, at least to give us some confidence to carry on would be great. Thanks for reading.
Technical SEO | | JHill0 -
Are lots of links from an external site to non-existant pages on my site harmful?
Google Webmaster Tools is reporting a heck of a lot of 404s which are due to an external site linking incorrectly to my site. The site itself has scraped content from elsewhere and has created 100's of malformed URLs. Since it unlikely I will have any joy having these linked removed by the creator of the site, I'd like to know how much damage this could be doing, and if so, is there is anything I can do to minimise the impact? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Nobody15569050351140 -
Ranking above PLACE PAGES
What does it take for results to show up above Place Page results. It seems like Google Local gets a lot of emphasis . Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | musillawfirm0
