403s vs 404s
-
Hey all,
Recently launched a new site on S3, and old pages that I haven't been able to redirect yet are showing up as 403s instead of 404s.
Is a 403 worse than a 404? They're both just basically dead-ends, right? (I have read the status code guides, yes.)
-
Oh I'm sorry I clearly misunderstood the question.
I have not seen any studies or testing done on this, but I have to assume that they are ignored by spiders entirely. I certainly don't think they are more damaging than a 404 would be. A 404 tends to be ignored and only registered if a certain amount of time passes and the page is still not found. Google doesn't make it a habit to instantly remove URLs unless you ask them to.
At the very worst, the 403/404 error would de-index that particular URL but this should not affect the rankings of your other pages and your actual site. And I think it'll take at least a good 30 days before Google will stop crawling those. That said, it shouldn't be crawling them at all if there aren't any links pointing to them either internally or externally. And if there are links pointing to the pages in question, you should be redirecting them via 301. That is of course if they are links you want.
Hope this was more helpful.
-
Hi Jesse,
Thanks for your response!
I understand the reason the 403s are happening; I was more curious as to whether they are more damaging to rankings when hit by a spider than a 404 would be
-
403s are forbiddens that are only returned if the server is told to block access to the file. If the site had been built with Wordpress in the past and has directories that match current directories, it may be returning 403 errors as the sitemap differs..
This is hard to explain and I think my wording it is confusing.
Say you had on your old site domain.com/blog/ and that went to your blog's index but now you have domain.com/blog/contents.html as your index. Well the /blog/ command would be trying to pull a directory and your server would normally automatically return a 403 forbidden for such requests.
Does this make sense? Might not be what's going on, but it's one possibility.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Canonical vs 301 for index.php
Hello, we found recently quite a big error our index.php file had no canonical tag nor was a 301 redirect. So we put a canonical tag to it that it's the main www.examle.com duplicate . Now is there any difference in regards to link juice or Google 301 vs canonical tag ? I read that moz did a 301 from their index php. I understand one difference is that user then can Type in the URL if no 301, but I'm interested about ranking effect of it.
Technical SEO | | advertisingcloud0 -
#1 rankings on both HTTP and HTTPS vs duplicate content
We're planning a full migrate to HTTPS for our website which is accessible today by both **www.**website.com, **http://**www.website.com as well as **https://**www.website.com. After the migrate the website will only be accessible by https requests and every other request (Ex. www or http) will be redirected to the same page but in HTTPS by 301 redirects. We've taken a lot of precautions like fixing all the internal links to HTTPS instead of HTTP etc. My questions is: What happened to your rankings for HTTP after making a full migrate to HTTPS?
Technical SEO | | OliviaStokholm0 -
Google Search Console Site Map Anomalies (HTTP vs HTTPS)
Hi I've just done my usual Monday morning review of clients Google Search Console (previously Webmaster Tools) dashboard and disturbed to see that for 1 client the Site Map section is reporting 95 pages submitted yet only 2 indexed (last time i looked last week it was reporting an expected level of indexed pages) here. It says the sitemap was submitted on the 10th March and processed yesterday. However in the 'Index Status' its showing a graph of growing indexed pages up to & including yesterday where they numbered 112 (so looks like all pages are indexed after all). Also the 'Crawl Stats' section is showing 186 pages crawled on the 26th. Then its listing sub site-maps all of which are non HTTPS (http) which seems very strange since the site is HTTPS and has been for a few months now and the main sitemap index url is an HTTPS: https://www.domain.com/sitemap_index.xml The sub sitemaps are:http://www.domain.com/marketing-sitemap.xmlhttp://www.domain.com/page-sitemap.xmlhttp://www.domain.com/post-sitemap.xmlThere are no 'Sitemap Errors' reported but there are 'Index Error' warnings for the above post-sitemap, copied below:_"When we tested a sample of the URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some of the URLs were unreachable. Please check your webserver for possible misconfiguration, as these errors may be caused by a server error (such as a 5xx error) or a network error between Googlebot and your server. All reachable URLs will still be submitted." _
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
Also for the below site map URL's: "Some URLs listed in this Sitemap have a high response time. This may indicate a problem with your server or with the content of the page" for:http://domain.com/en/post-sitemap.xmlANDhttps://www.domain.com/page-sitemap.xmlAND https://www.domain.com/post-sitemap.xmlI take it from all the above that the HTTPS sitemap is mainly fine and despite the reported 0 pages indexed in GSC sitemap section that they are in fact indexed as per the main 'Index Status' graph and that somehow some HTTP sitemap elements have been accidentally attached to the main HTTPS sitemap and the are causing these problems.What's best way forward to clean up this mess ? Resubmitting the HTTPS site map sounds like right option but seeing as the master url indexed is an https url cant see it making any difference until the http aspects are deleted/removed but how do you do that or even check that's what's needed ? Or should Google just sort this out eventually ? I see the graph in 'Crawl > Sitemaps > WebPages' is showing a consistent blue line of submitted pages but the red line of indexed pages drops to 0 for 3 - 5 days every 5 days or so. So fully indexed pages being reported for 5 day stretches then zero for a few days then indexed for another 5 days and so on ! ? Many ThanksDan0 -
A/B testing entire website VS Seo issues
I'm familar with A/B testing variations of a page but I'd like to A/B test a new designs version of a e-commerce site. I´m wondering about the best way to test with SEO concerns... this is what I´ve in mind right now, any suggestion? Use parameters to make version B different from A version. Redirect 50% of the users with 302 ( or javascript would be a better way?) Use noindex in the B pages. Use rel=canonical in the B pages pointing to A version. In the end use 301 redirect to all B pages to A urls. PS: We can´t use subdomain and i don´t wanna use robots.txt file to protect the new design from competitors. I´d love any suggestions and tips about it - thanks folks 🙂
Technical SEO | | SeoMartin10 -
Updating inbound links vs. 301 redirecting the page they link to
Hi everyone, I'm preparing myself for a website redesign and finding conflicting information about inbound links and 301 redirects. If I have a URL (we'll say website.com/website) that is linked to by outside sources, should I get those outside sources to update their links when I change the URL to website.com/webpage? Or is it just as effective from a link juice perspective to simply 301 redirect the old page to the new page? Are there any other implications to this choice that I may want to consider? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Liggins0 -
404s in GWT - Not sure how they are being found
We have been getting multiple 404 errors in GWT that look like this: http://www.example.com/UpdateCart. The problem is that this is not a URL that is part of our structure, it is only a piece. The actual URL has a query string on the end, so if you take the query string off, the page does not work. I can't figure out how Google is finding these pages. Could it be removing the query string? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Colbys0 -
Too many on-page links vs. UX issue
I am having an issue with many of our pages having too many on-page links. I have gotten many of them below the 100 page limit that is suggested and I understand this is not a critical factor with SEO, but my issue is this: Many important pages I am trying to optimize are buried at a "3rd" level which is actually not accessible from the home page navigation dropdown due to our outdated CMS. I am trying to decide if we should develop our site to display these pages on-hover from the main navigation. This would make a lot of sense since users would find these pages easier, however adding this functionality would increase on-page links by a lot more. So in your opinion, would it be worth it to spend the money to have this functionality developed? Or would it end up hurting our SEO standings?
Technical SEO | | isret_efront0 -
Google Webmaster tools vs SeoMOZ Crawl Diagnostics
Hi Guys I was just looking over my weekly report and crawl diagnostics. What I've noticed is that the data gathered on SeoMoz is different from Google Webmaster diagnostics. The number of errors, in particular duplicate page titles, content and pages not found is much higher that what google webmaster tools is represents. I'm a bit confused and don't know which data is more accurate. Please Help
Technical SEO | | Tolod0