What's the best way to eliminate "429 : Received HTTP status 429" errors?

[ryanjcormier]

My company website is built on WordPress. It receives very few crawl errors, but it do regularly receive a few (typically 1-2 per crawl) "429 : Received HTTP status 429" errors through Moz.

Based on my research, my understand is that my server is essentially telling Moz to cool it with the requests. That means it could be doing the same for search engines' bots and even visitors, right? This creates two questions for me, which I would greatly appreciate your help with:

1. Are "429 : Received HTTP status 429" errors harmful for my SEO? I imagine the answer is "yes" because Moz flags them as high priority issues in my crawl report.

2. What can I do to eliminate "429 : Received HTTP status 429" errors?

Any insight you can offer is greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Ryan

[LesleyPaone]

Contact your host and ask let them know about the errors. More than likely they have mod_sec enabled to limit request rates. Ask them to up the limit that you are getting 429 errors from crawlers and you do not want them.

[ryanjcormier]

Many thanks - I will contact them now!

[wcbuckner]

What'd they say Ryan? Having the same issue and just contacted Godaddy who told me that basically Moz's software is pinging my client's server too frequently so Godaddy is temporarily blocking their IP. They said it's not a concern though as they would never block Google from pinging/indexing the site.

[ryanjcormier]

Chase,

They ran a bunch of internal diagnostic tools on my site, and were unable to replicate the 429 errors. They ended up telling me exactly what they told you. I haven't noticed any issues with my site's rankings, or any flags in Webmaster Tools, so it looks like they are right so far. I just hate logging into Moz and seeing all those crawl errors!

[rsigg]

We host on Media Temple's Premium WordPress hosting (which I do not recommend, but that's another post for another place), and the techs there told me that it could be an issue with the robots.txt file:

"The issue may be with the settings in the robots.txt file. It looks fine to me but the "Crawl-delay" line might be causing issues. I understand. For the most part, crawlers tend to use robots.txt to determine how to crawl your site, so you may want to see if Moz requires some special settings in there to work correctly."

Ours is set to:

Crawl-delay: 1

I haven't tried changing these values yet in our file, but may experiment with this very soon. If I get results, I'll post back here as well as start a new forum thread.

[ryanjcormier]

Interesting. I look forward to hearing your results, as my robots.txt file is also set to:

Crawl-delay: 1.

[Rajaindiain]

I am also on the same hosting and they have not been able to help with the 429. I have now started getting 429 errors when I attempt to login. Definitely something wrong with wp premium hosting.

[Netrepid]

I have a customer that is using GoDaddy website hosting (at least according to BuiltWith) and I'm experiencing this same issue.

Any updates on this experiment from user rsigg? I'd love to know if I can remove this from my customer's robots file...

FWIW, Netrepid is a hosting provider for colocation, infrastructure and applications (website hosting being considered an application) and we would never force a crawl delay on a Wordpress install!

Not hating on the other hosting service providers... #justsayin