403 Error on WMT but not on MOZ?

[homs83]

Hello,

2 days ago I found there are about 1200 of 403 errors by Google WMT when I tried to fetch my domain - Please see attached

HTTP/1.1 403 Access Forbidden Cache-Control: private Content-Type: text/html ETag: "" Server: Set-Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDSSBARTSD=BEHMJHJBKJOEJEALECNNIPFH; path=/; HttpOnly X-Powered-By: Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2014 13:54:10 GMT Content-Length: 1233

<title>403 - Forbidden: Access is denied.</title>

Server Error

<fieldset>

403 - Forbidden: Access is denied.

You do not have permission to view this directory or page using the credentials that you supplied.

</fieldset>

---

I ran a complete report using MOZ but I was shocked not see any 4xx , 5xx errors.  Google: 246 of 404 errors

No Google, Yahoo or Bing blocking

HTTP status code: ALL 200

301 redirect: none?  I have done about 2500 over 4 years.

The website is losing indexed pages.  I'm not sure what's going and which numbers to trust.

Please help.  Thank you.

Adam

[redfishking]

It's difficult to say exactly what is wrong in this situation, but here are a couple of questions that might help narrow it down.

Have you tried manually going to the pages that appear to have these errors?

Did you recently change any URLs on your site?

Is the sitemap you submitted in WMT still valid?

[ErinMcCaul]

Hi Adam!

Thanks for writing in to Q&A! Let's dive right into this nitty gritty!

There are a lot of reasons you could be seeing these data discrepancies. If you're seeing more GWT errors, it could be because they have 'discovered links' through different means. Moz starts with your home page and uses recursive crawling to find pages on your site. We keep crawling until we stop finding unique links, or until we hit your page crawl limit. Bottom line, when we crawl your site your homepage is the only seed. We know that Google uses multiple seeds, so it could be possible Google is indexing more pages that way.

403 errors are agent specific. There's also a possibility that on a server level you're blocking WMT from crawling, but not rogerbot.

I looked into your account, and it looks like we're only crawling about 3,500 pages. Also, we generally limit our crawls to about 200 links per page. When I looked into your account, I saw that in most cases you had well beyond 200 internal links per page.

We have a few different options moving forward. To help you further I need examples of the following:

-specific URLs that show GWT errors, but don't show errors on Moz.
-a link hierarchy from that URL that goes back to your homepage.

I want to respect your privacy, so if you'd like to take this conversation offline, please email us at help@moz.com!

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions!

Have a great rest of your Thursday!

Erin