Awesome! Definitely happy you let us know

Hi Raviv - great, that will be your quickest source to the answer I think at this stage. Do update us if you can!

-Dan

Ah good! We've ruled out Yoast. Either one of two things are going on;

1. Tags are simply broken.

2. Maybe the link to the tags are just broken.

Can you adjust the URL at all to get to tags? Maybe the links are adding something extra in the URL making it incorrect? Or you can't get to tags at all. From within the Admin section, try going to Posts->Tag and hovering over a tag click "view" to try and view that tag archive. If it's still broken then it's tags themselves.

Either way this is leaning more towards a development issue, and maybe you want to contact the help department for your theme, or try the WordPress help forum.

-Dan

Hi Raviv

Yes, go to plugins and hit "disable" - you shouldn't lose your information, but I would take screenshots or write down of your settings just in case. Definitely don't delete the plugin - just disable it temporarily.

Let me know!

-Dan

Raviv

Just to make sure we're not assuming incorrectly, temporarily shut off the Yoast SEO plugin. This should be fine to do for just a few minutes. Do you still get the 403 errors? If so, then it is not the Yoast plugin but some other issue.

Also, do you get this error while logged out of WordPress? Trying doing it on your site in incognito mode in Chrome without logging in.

Let us know what happens with both of those tests!

-Dan

Interesting. I too had not come across a 429 error either.

I crawled your site once with Screaming Frog at normal speed and got some 429 errors. Those pages are indexed and cached - so there does not seem to be a dire emergency.

I did a second crawl, slower, with Screaming Frog - and still got a few 429 errors but not nearly as many. Thing is though, even though pages are getting indexed and cached, some pages will throw the 429 error on some crawls, and then maybe not the next crawl. So it's enough to get through, but would be better to not have them.

From what I can tell, it seems this code is set at the server level - so perhaps you should contact your host to inquire about it. Are you on a normal hosting setup or are you going through something like WP Engine? The number of requests allowed needs to be increased. Or as Mike said, this could be an included API call that's causing it.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Hi Dan

Hmm that's a little strange. Two things;

• is WordPress updated? Do you get the normal URLs when viewing in your browser?
• have you tried Screaming Frog SEO Spider? It's free to crawl up to 500 pages Although it won't get the actual HTML on the pages, it could solve the URL issue perhaps.

This blackhat world thread has a few options too.

-Dan

Hi Anthony

There's two separate things here, so I'll attack each one individually - and give you some insight to the thought process.

• First - there's the issue of IF you should move them to WP
• Second - if you should, the question is how?

Should You Move To** WordPress**

It's unquestionable that for design, practicality, and long term benefits - you should move them to WordPress. The issue it really all about the ranking. So the questions then become - WHY is the site ranking now, and could you preserve that ranking with a migration.

I would look at things in the following ways.

• First - determine what keywords we're talking about. Is it just head terms? Is it just the exact match of the domain? I'd make a list.
• Then - try to determine why the sites are ranking for the given keywords. The Keyword Difficulty tool is great for that.
• Basically - what we really need to rule out, is if Google sites pass any authority that regular sites do not? I don't see that this is the case.

My inclination would be the say that you can safely migrate - so long as it's done correctly .. see next.

How To Migrate To WordPress

I should preface and say that I have no experience with Google Sites. But let's assume the following things are possible.

1. Build your new WordPress site - obviously on a test server of some sort.
2. Make the new WordPress site have the same content as the current site (same text, titles, etc). We want as little variables and moving parts. Scrape the existing site if you have to with Screaming Frog to grab a lot of that.
3. You can change URLs if you want to - but prepare the 301 redirects ahead of time.
4. "Flip the switch" - I assume you're on your own hosting? You can just basically switch out Google Sites with WordPress.
5. Immediately activate the 301 redirects (if any).
6. Immediately crawl the site looking for 404s
7. Monitor webmaster tools for 404s.
8. After a few weeks, you can probably start improving text etc etc.

Obviously without a deeper look I can't guarantee this as full proof. But I believe you should be fine - the main thing is just those 301s.

Also - couldn't hurt to just try this on one site first!

-Dan