Better to 301 or de-index 403 pages

[94501]

Google WMT recently found and called out a large number of old unpublished pages as access denied errors. The pages are tagged "noindex, follow."  These old pages are in Google's index.

At this point, would it better to 301 all these pages or submit an index removal request or what? Thanks... Darcy

[DirkC]

It's not really necessary to 301 these pages - a 403 status code informs Google that the access is denied (Literally: The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it. Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated.)

Normally these pages will disappear from WMT after a while. If you find these 403 annoying in your WMT reports, you can always 301 them - but this isn't strictly necessary.

Removal tool - Google's advice is not to use the tool "to clean up cruft, like old pages that 404" (source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1269119?hl=en).

rgds

Dirk

[94501]

Hi Dirk,

Thanks for the message. You may be right. Thing is, GWT's discovery of this large number of now blocked pages (previously indexed) seems to have coincided with a big drop in search overall.

I guess the part that I wonder about it is, if these now blocked pages as 403s are no problem and Google will just figure it out, why does it bother to list them in errors... just in case you didn't know, but that it doesn't in fact care one way or the other search-wise and it won't affect your other pages? Just wondering. Thanks... Darcy

[DirkC]

The main reason why errors are listed is that you can solve them (if necessary). If these are old pages that don't have existing links on your pages - you can just forget about these warnings. However, if these warnings appear because actual pages are linking to non-existing pages this will lead to a degraded user experience and user experience is a factor which counts for SEO.

If you look at the 403 errors - normally WMT lists how the bot got to these pages. If the pages that are linking to this 403 pages are still on your site, you have to remove these links.

If you have dropped in traffic, you could try to do a full crawl of your site using screaming frog of Xenu, to do a quick check-up of the technical health of your site.

If you still have an old sitemap, or the most popular pages in Google Analytics from the period before migration, you could also use these url's as input for Screamingfrog - and check if all pages were properly redirected. If errors pop-up, these would be the ones I would redirect. I understood from your initial question that the 403's where coming from very old pages which were never meant to be accessible.

rgds

Dirk

[94501]

Sounds solid. Thanks, Dirk!