Pages Returning A 403 Error

[wesdunn1977]

Hiya Moz Community

I hope you are all great, I have a question regarding one of my websites, I have the main site and 2 sub folder sites essentially, I decided to upgrade one of the sites and placed it in a different sub folder, I then set up a 301 redirect to the new location, so far so good, I have been having a look at my  link profile using AHrefs, inside there is an SEO report facility, I ran the report and I have over 500 pages returning a 403 or Forbidden error. my question is whether the Equity from those pages is being passed to the new site?

I actually removed all the old site from Google Cache to avoid misleading visitors, I suppose I could set the re-directs up manually if I the equity is not being passed to the new site although I was under the impression it would be, or 85% - 90% of it would be anyway.

The reason why I am asking is that I have seen a significant drop in rankings for keywords that my site has always ranked highly for. thought I would see if you guys can clear that up for me.

Thanks and regards

Wes Dunn

[kayintveen_MD]

If the pages return a 403 they are not passing through any link equity. Why can't you 301 all of the old links to the new location. That would be the way. the 403's can really hurt your site + rankings. Just removing all old content and doing nothing else is not the way to go. all old urls should return 301 to the correct ones!

[wesdunn1977]

Thanks Microdesign to be honest I have only just thought about checking into it as I only performed the upgrade a few weeks ago, I thought Moz may give me some indication when it does the weekly crawl on my site but the only errors that have come back are smaller issues like a few duplicate titles or missing Meta Description for pages that are not majorly important.

Thanks for the reply, I have a list of all the URL's so I will go to work

regards

Wes Dunn

[kayintveen_MD]

Good luck, its a nasty job but has to be done for your own good Cheers.

[wesdunn1977]

hahaha.. Im not afraid of hard work, I know it's not the most glamorous job but I am obviously quite happy about it, I worked hard building up the SEO of all my pages on the old site, just a bit naive not to know the answer to that one already but that's why I am here. to get help from the best out there.

thanks again and best of luck

regards

Wes Dunn