Do 403 Forbidden errors from website pages hurt rankings?

[vtmoz]

Hi All,

I noticed that our website has lot of 403 errors across different pages using the tool http://www.deadlinkchecker.com/. Do these errors hurt website rankings?

Thanks

[Alick300]

Hi,

If you are getting 403 forbidden access response for important page/pages e.g home page/important categories pages  then that may be a problem.

Thanks

[vtmoz]

Hi,

Can you please confirm whether below kind of links hurt which are technically 403.

https://d2jbzoiok12mw2.cloudfront.net/wp-json/oembed/1.0/embed?url

Thanks

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Google's official stance is that it's no big deal. They'll simply won't rank those URLs (so if you are getting 403s for pages you want to rank, that's an issue).

However, if those 403's have external backlinks, I'd redirect them to a similar live page on your site to not lose those links. I also prefer to not waste crawler time visiting non-existent pages so if its easy to do, I'd minimize the number of 403 response codes on the site.

You sample 403 looks like an offsite CDN which shouldn't hurt, but it is taking up unnecessary resources. No reason not to remove.

[vtmoz]

Hi Oleg,

Thanks for the response. This error is limited to one of the links from every page of our website.

I mean the below link has been repeated across all pages of our website which is been returning as 403 forbidden technically.

https://d2jbzoiok12mw2.cloudfront.net/wp-json/oembed/1.0/embed?url

Will these hurt or we can ignore?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

You should remove it if possible. No reason to link to a dead link (poor ux, waste crawler time) or call a non-existent resource (slow site down).

However, I don't think it will make any noticeable effect on your rankings.