Understanding how to fix a 403 issue with my website

[LeDanJohnson]

Hi guys, I hope you can help solve a mystery for me!

My site FranceForFamilies.com has been around for 9 years and has always ranked well - at least until I launched a new Wordpress version earlier this year.

The purpose of the relaunch was to improve the look of the site, so I kept the content and meta titles the same but created a new design.

However, from the day of the new launch the search engine rankings have plummeted, to the point where most seem to have disappeared all together.

I have found that when Moz crawls the site, it only crawls one page.

I asked the Moz team about this and they said that the site is returning a 403. They also tested this using a curl and received a 406 response:

• curl -I www.franceforfamilies.com/
• HTTP/1.1 406 Not Acceptable

However, when I check our Google Webmaster tools I can't recreate the issue.

I don't really know what is going on, and I don't have the technical knowledge to solve this - can you help?

Thanks, Daniel

[PremioOscar]

Hello there,

I would suggest you to crawl your site with Screaming Frog, it will give you very detailed information about your site and it is very very helpful especially with this sort of errors/problems.

Good luck

Oscar

[LesleyPaone]

Those two errors are generally generated by mod_security. Can you check to see if it is enabled on your server. If it is disable it and see if you still get the error.

[LeDanJohnson]

Thanks Oscar, I'll take a look. However my issue is that I know what the problem is, but I don't know how to fix it.

[LeDanJohnson]

Thanks Lesley, I'll take a look at this and report back.

Best, Dan