Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
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Web crawl errors
HTTP errors 10 Details »
Not found 0 --
URLs not followed 0 --
URLs restricted by robots.txt 0 --
URLs timed out 0 --
Unreachable URLs 0 --
Total: 10
DetailLast Calculated
4xx error
Mar 22, 2008
403 (Forbidden)
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After doing some research I found that these warnings could be caused by my host service provider. I contacted GoDaddy and asked them if their servers were blocking the Google bot from indexing my site, and this is what they had to say: (NOTHING! Just a boilerplate reply.)
Could someone explain me why Google is not able to index my site, but Yahoo and MSN are? I don't have any Flash or dynamic content on my site. I only have 50 pages of text, nothing out of this world. Why am I getting a 403 (Forbidden) error code? What does this really mean? Can I do anything in my Webmaster Tools account that would get this resolved? I resubmitted my sitemap, but I still have the 403 warning message displayed in my account. Has anyone encounter this problem before?
[edited by: tedster at 8:29 pm (utc) on Mar. 25, 2008]
The correct UA (AFAIK) sting is:
Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
If you receive a 403, then I would check the .htaccess or bot-trap script, or anywhere else you might be able to create a forbidden error.
If you do not receive an error, I would wait and see if the issue corrects itself. I received a forbidden error on one of my sites for about an hour the other night, spent 30 minutes dissecting my .htaccess, and then realized it was not me, it was a temporary issue with my host.
It's entirely possible you experienced the same thing, and GoogleBot happened to stop by while there was some sort of temporary issue.
My guess is it's a GoDaddy issue, but a temporary one, not permanent, because they would have serious issues with webmasters if they were banning Google from their servers.
Justin
The host I was referring to, and had the issue with was not GoDaddy, but I think I received the forbidden error on the night of the 22nd. (It was the either the 22nd or 23rd). Makes me wonder if there was some type of wide spread issue for a while. My host is on the West Coast, and I think GoDaddy's main server farm is in Arizona, and it seems odd there were 'forbidden errors' going around on hosts which are normally stable.
Justin
