Impact of 401s on Site Rankings

[Christy-Correll]

Will having 401s on a site negatively impact rankings? (e.g. 401s thrown from a social media sharing icon)

[KeriMorgret]

Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?

Thanks!

[Christy-Correll]

So how would you block spiders from crawling social media sharing icons? Or is there another workaround?

[TellThemEverything]

Yes, I believe any http error response is a bad thing and could affect your ranking. Even 404's or 301's (when links on-site or in sitemap cause them) are cause for concern. You want to make your site as squeaky clean as possible.

I regularly use a site crawler to check my site, including sitemap/rss feeds, and fix any non-200 responses.

[Goetzman]

First here is an error list: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40132

Response code 403 is for requests, where authentication makes no difference, disabled directory browsing.
401 Unauthorized would be the response to send.

I'd suggest using robot.txt to stop going to these pages? Or even better, if you can allow Google's spiders access (I'm not 100% sure how this is done)