I have a client who sells highly technical products and has lots and lots (a couple of hundred) pdf datasheets that can be downloaded from their website. But in order to download a datasheet, a user has to register on the site. Once they are registered, they can download whatever they want (I know this isn't a good idea but this wasn't set up by us and is historical). On doing a Moz crawl of the site, it came up with a couple of hundred 401 errors. When I investigated, they are all pages where there is a button to click through to get one of these downloads. The Moz error report calls the error "Bot verification".

My questions are:
Are these really errors?
If so, what can I do to fix them?
If not, can I just tell Moz to ignore them or will this cause bigger problems?

Hi Miriam

Thank you for your very full reply, I appreciate your help. I agree with you it is a low priority and I have pointed this out to the client! The suggestion that Shannon made has already started to produce results and I agree with you that the website needs to have more links and a higher domain authority. We have recently taken over the website and are busy adding content to it as it was quite meagre in its content. Earning backlinks is our next objective.

Question: does Moz Local now work for UK businesses? A couple of years ago I used it for a client and when it came up for renewal I was told by Moz that it no longer supported UK businesses. So Moz gave me a refund as it had accepted online payment for the renewal. I had assumed it still didn't support UK businesses, but if you're saying it does, that's a whole other ball game! Please could you advise on this as I have several clients that would benefit from Moz Local.

Thanks again for all your help.

best regards, Maureen

Hi Colemckeon, thanks very much for your suggestions. I will look for a directory service in the UK as I think those you mentioned might just be for the USA.

Although the part I don't understand is how does Google get confused between 2 companies on the basis of a phone number which does not appear on the other company's website anyway?

Thanks Shannon,  those are all great suggestions, I will try them out. Many thanks

If I search for my client's phone number on Google, without gaps, ie 02036315541,  another company comes up at the top of the list. This company has a similar name to ours, but it is in a different town and it does different things. My company name is Energy Contract Renewals https://www.energycontractrenewals.co.uk/ and their company is https://energyrenewals.co.uk. As far as I can see, the other company does not mention our phone number anywhere on their site or on their GMB page so I don't know why they are coming up.  We do not come up at all for this search.

However,  if I put our phone number in like this: 020 3631 5541, our company does come up and the other company does not.

Anyone know how I can correct this or if it is even possible to do something about it?

Couldn't you have implemented a change to the DA that meant my client's sites went UP instead of down! British manufacturer of hospital furniture dropped from 35 to 21 overnight. The only saving grace is that their competitors have dropped in the same ratio.

Hi, I know this is an old question but I wanted to ask about the first paragraph of your answer: "You can start by trying the "site:domain.com" search. This won't show you all the pages which are indexed, but it can help you determine which ones aren't indexed."

Do you happen to know why doing a site:domain.com search doesn't show all the indexed pages? I've just discovered this for our website. Down the site: command shows 73 pages but checking through the list, there are lots of pages not included. However if I do the site:domain.com/page.html command for those individual pages, they do come up in the search results page. I don't understand why though?

Hi Lisa, is Moz planning to add in the ability to view the keyword rankings over time in a graphical format? This would be a great thing to show on a Custom Report.