Increase in authorization permission errors (Access Denied - Error 403)

[gpapatheodorou]

Hi  MOZ community,

Since last week when I changed my theme in a WP installation I noticed (in WMT and MOZ tool) that I have increased number in authorization permission errors (error 403-forbidden).

What happens is that I received a 403 error for almost every single URL of my site. All these URLs are not "real" ones but they all have my email in the end.

i.e. I get an 403 error for the "/contact/support@fantasylogic.com" whilst the real URL is just "/contact/"

This happens, as I said, for almost every single page of my site. I have no other crawling or indexation issues, all URLs are correctly indexed. All new pages are correctly indexed as well. URIs ending with "support@fantasylogic.com" are not indexed off course.

WP and all installed plugins & theme are on the latest available release. For SEO purposes I use Yoast SEO WP plugin. The site in questions is: fantasylogic.com

Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.

Thank you in advance

[LesleyPaone]

Are you hosted on AWS or using resources from a S3 bucket? By default those resources do not send a 404 for not found resources, they send a 403 for some reason.

[gpapatheodorou]

No. Neither AWS nor S3. The main issue is that the URLs that are sending 403 error are not "real". I mean that they are the same URLs as the existing/real ones but they have my email (fantasylogic.com/xxxxxxxxxx/support@fantasylogic.com/) in the end. The "normal" URL (fantasylogic.com/xxxxxxxxxx/) is indexed correctly and at the same time I receive a 403 error for "fantasylogic.com/xxxxxxxxxx/support@fantasylogic.com/". How and why these URIs are created? And why are they reachable to crawlers?

[LesleyPaone]

It is because your email link in your top bar is not formed correctly. You just have your email address, you need to add mailto: in front of it.

[gpapatheodorou]

Thank you!

It makes sense. On the top left corner of the bar email is not a link. So I suppose this is not where the fault is located. BUT, I had forgotten the mailto: prefix in the email link in the footer. I changed it there. Let's hope that was the case

Thank you for the feedback