803 Error

[paul_pm]

I started receiving an 803 error last week for two campaigns and our web dev team has not done any updates to trigger this. Any help on getting this fixed would be greatly appreciated!

Paul

[tawnycase]

Hi there! Tawny from Moz's Help Team here. 
When you see an 803 error, that means your site closed its TCP connection to our crawler before our crawler could read a complete HTTP response. You don't see this error when you go to the page in your browser because content-length is an outdated component for modern browsers and they will disregard this error, but the intention of our crawler is to report any errors that might be occurring. So the crawler is configured to detect and report such errors.

I'm not a web dev (since I'm just here to support our tools) so I can't exactly tell you how to fix this issue. However, one of our very trusted community members, Sha Menz, has a great answer regard 803 errors here: https://moz.com/community/q/how-do-fix-an-803-error
​
​I hope this helps!

[jessential]

Much depends on where your site lives. I spoke extensively with Bluehost this week because of having same error resurface at odd times and my site correspondingly lowered considerably in MOZ's trust score. (At least at the same time, although I wonder about this.)

You may need to try server load testing for servers using virtual users to learn what limitations currently exist. It helps if you highly optimize your site to load fast (recommend that you use Accelerated Mobile Pages). Monitor CPU loads, ram usage, and database connections/queries to see if they run efficiently. Reasons already exist and more are coming that make these pages load faster to reduce such complications as well as new advertising opportunities to target mobile buyers.

Typically shared servers are managed to some degree by the hosting company.  You can call them and perhaps together reset your timing in php configurations. They often won't make the change for you, you have to physically do that, but your web host may walk you through these timing tweaks for your site's TCP connection.

I have another client with the same host but who pays for a  VPS ULTIMATE package. That means that his server is unmanaged by the host, but on his site so far, we have not had the TCP connection close to the Moz crawler that we know of.

QUESTION: Moz, any chance you will simply extend the time your crawler takes to reduce these complications?

[tawnycase]

Hi there! Tawny from Moz's Customer Support team here.

I think it's pretty unlikely that we'll change the behavior of our crawler, unfortunately.

When we crawl your site we adhere to the “Politeness Policy” so that we don't impact the performance of your site:

• We do this by dynamically controlling (throttling) the number of URLs that we crawl per minute, per hour. If we determine that your site is responding slowly or there are network issues, we extend the crawl intervals. Following the Politeness Policy protects your site from excessive load.

• Roger Mozbot schedules and crawls thousands of sites a day.

• Other items can affect the crawl, including changes to your site, network conditions, how your site crawl is scheduled compared to other crawls, etc.

Hope this helps!