Are google for real?

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[Casey_Bryan]

I remember seeing this on SEO Roundtable a few days ago: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-403-status-codes-25674.html

In what instances would you want to use a 403 and not 404?

[Guest]

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[Casey_Bryan]

As long as any 403 pages don't need to be indexed/don't have any backlinks pointing to them, then I would expect a 403 to be completely fine, as per this article: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/12/improving-url-removals-on-third-party.html (however it is from 2013!).

I wonder if John is just trying to say it's a waste of a crawlers time and perhaps instead these sorts of pages should be blocked from being crawled altogether?

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[Casey_Bryan]

I hear ya! You've always got to be a bit suss, unfortunately!

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