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Hi,

I'm also experiencing a similar issue on my German-based website, https://kopfoderzahl.org/. We use S3 buckets for storing images, and while these images load perfectly fine with a 200 status, they appear in tools like "Top Pages" with a 403 status under link opportunities. It's puzzling since the URLs work as expected when accessed directly.

It seems like a mismatch between how the tool crawls or interprets these URLs and the actual server response. If anyone has insights or potential solutions, I’d love to hear them. Thanks!

Hi WhiteboardCreations,

I’ve encountered a similar issue on my own website, where I host PDFs. The images were returning 200 when accessed directly but showed up as 403 errors in various tools. In my case, the problem was related to S3 bucket permissions, particularly the settings for public access and how some crawlers interact with them. Double-checking the permissions and ensuring they are correctly configured for Moz's crawler could help. You might also need to refresh Moz's cache for these URLs.

For reference, I also run a PDF-related site: OceanofPDF , and this solution worked for me.

Hope this resolves your issue!

Thanks for bringing up this issue regarding 403 errors! I faced a similar problem with one of my websites where specific assets were giving 403 errors randomly. It took me a while to figure out that the issue was related to server permissions. After tweaking the permissions and making sure all assets were properly accessible, the problem was resolved.

By the way, if anyone’s interested, I’ve implemented some of these solutions on my site https://letmewatchthiss.com/, and it’s been working fine since then. Maybe it might help someone facing a similar issue.