403s: Are There Instances Where 403's Are Common & Acceptable?

[JJLWeber]

Hey All,

Both MOZ & Webmaster tools have identified 403 errors on an editorial site I work with (using Drupal CMS). I looked into the errors and the pages triggering the 403 are all articles in draft status that are not being indexed. If I am not logged into our drupal and I try to access an article in draft status I get the 403 forbidden error.

Are these 403's typical for an editorial site where editors may be trying to access an article in draft status while they are not logged in? Webmaster tools is showing roughly 350 pages with the 'Access Denied' 403 status.

Are these harmful to rank?

Thanks!

[Bigb06]

Hello,

No problem with these URLs, Drupal returns a 403 correctly because crawlers try to get draft content. Google and other search engines will not penalized you because of that : you can think of cart URLs or account URLs for ecommerce websites that may returns 403 the same way.

[RuthBurrReedy]

If Moz and Webmaster Tools are showing the 403 error, it means that they are able to crawl to the URLs that are returning the 403 - so somewhere on your site or on the web, pages that are accessible by bots and crawlers are linking to these pages that don't exist yet. Having a bunch of errors on your site can impact Google's ability to crawl it well, which can impact your rankings, so it's best to get those cleaned up. In Webmaster Tools you should be able to click on the pages and see which pages are linking to them, so you can remove those links; you can do the same using a tool like Screaming Frog if you'd prefer. Good luck!

[RuthBurrReedy]

I agree that it's probably not a huge problem, but still something to clean up if you can - it would be best if crawlers weren't trying to access these pages.

[JJLWeber]

Thanks Nicolas & Ruth. I realized the reason the pages are triggering errors is because there are published pages linking to those posts in draft. I imagine those draft posts were live at some point and then put back into draft.

Im guessing if I kill all the links to those draft posts that will fix the issue.

[Cannetastic]

Hi guys and girls,

With regards to this, ss there any problem for SEO that you can see with banning spam refers through Htaccess?

So in these instances when a spam bots comes to the site, we throw a "Forbidden You don't have permission to access / on this server.", so basically a 403 error?

We're considering this as a more permanent solution to using filters in GA.

What do you think?

Thanks,

Gill.