Site OK but Deadlinks and article sites showing 403 Forbidden

Article sites and dead-links.com give 403 error for working site

[fr1234]

The owner of a site we are hosing is doing some promotion on various article sites. She has posted a couple of articles on ezine but they have flagged the site as showing 403 forbidden and removed her "dead" links from the article. The site is fine and has never once been down, I have tried accessing it from a number of different locations with no issues. I have checked the site on [a link checker] and it is also getting the 403 error.

We have a number of other sites hosted on the same box, some of which we do our own promotion for on the same article sites and have no issues.

Can anyone think of any reason why this particular site would be experiencing issues?

(NB The site is hosted on [snip] hosting)

[edited by: phranque at 10:17 am (utc) on Nov. 16, 2009]
[edit reason] No urls, please. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[rocknbil]

Is there a difference between the links in the SERPS and the links within the site?

Does accessing the pages require a login, or does it require a unique ID in the query string? (very bad if it does.) It's entirely possible in working on a site you log in, or it's got a persistent cookie that is required to access the articles and you forgot about it (A stretch, throwing ideas in . . .)

What is going on in the .htaccess file? A scenario, serve up a 403 if the referrer is not from "this site" - often used to nix hotlinking to images, it could be something like this.

You could try deleting cookies for the site, logging out, etc., but a good way to avoid all that is to fire up a browser you never/seldom use, visit the site from there. I've discovered my greatest epiphanies (and subsequent "face-palm" moments) this way.

[fr1234]

Hi Rock,

Thankyou for your response. I appreciate you taking the time. The page doesn't require any log in or querystrings used for any pages on the site. As it is Windows hosting, we do not have an .htaccess file.

I have never accessed the site in Opera before, I tried this and this was fine too.

If you pop [the domain] into [a link checker], it displays the homepage, it is only when crawling the internal links that it displays the 403.

Bizarre

[edited by: phranque at 10:14 am (utc) on Nov. 16, 2009]
[edit reason] No urls, please. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[rocknbil]

That is truly strange, the only explanation I have ATM is some sites are disallowed by a server configuration, I'd ask the host what's up.

[edited by: phranque at 10:15 am (utc) on Nov. 16, 2009]
[edit reason] cleanup [/edit]