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
-
Domain Authority vs. Page Authority: What’s More Important?
I have a couple of questions about this. First of all is one more important than the other? Also, I currently have a website setup for https://gogoanime.city. How is it possible to grow page authority yet I am having a hard time growing domain authority. Thank you !
Technical SEO | | gogoanimetp0 -
Old forum with 404s, what should I do?
Hello, So I'm helping out some friends with their SEO. I've just run a Screaming Frog crawl of their entire site (which took hours and hours I might add). They used to have a forum connected to the site, which is no longer active. Google is still indexing all of the old URLs, which unsurprisingly return 404 errors. What should they do to prevent Google from indexing these pages? That's assuming they need to do anything at all. They don't have access to these old forum posts and therefore won't be able to fix the URL or resource adding a 301 redirect pointing to the most relevant alternate page. I'm new to SEO but my instinct is that they need to have the page return a 410 ‘Gone’ response code to give search engines a clear signal that the page no longer exists and won’t be returning, and removing the internal links to that URL or resource. 1. Is this interpretation correct?
Technical SEO | | jordanayresaira
2. What is the impact of leaving these 404s? There are over a thousand, so there's a lot 3. What should I recommend?0 -
Clean URL vs. Parameter URL and Using Canonical URL...That's a Mouthfull!
Hi Everyone, I a currently migrating a Magento site over to Shopify Plus and have a question about best practices for using the canonical URL. There is a competitor that I believe is not doing it the correct way, so I want to make sure my way is the better choice. With 'Vendor Pages' in Shopify, they show up looking like: https://www.campusprotein.com/collections/vendors?q=Cellucor. Not as clean. Problem is that Shopify also creates https://www.campusprotein.com/collections/cellucor. Same products, same page, just a different more clean URL. I am seeing both indexed in Google. What I want to do is basically create a canonical URL from the URL with the parameter that points to the clean URL. The two pages are very similar. The only difference is that the clean URL page has some additional content at the top of the page. I would say the two pages are 90% the same. Do you see any issue with that?
Technical SEO | | vetofunk0 -
Www vs non www - Crawl Error 902
I have just taken over admin of my company website and I have been confronted with crawl error 902 on the existing campaign that has been running for years in Moz. This seems like an intermittent problem. I have searched and tried to go over many of the other solutions and non of them seem to help. The campaign is currently set-up with the url http://companywebsite.co.uk when I tried to do a Moz manual crawl using this URL I got an error message. I changed the link to crawl to http://www.companywebsite.co.uk and the crawl went off without a hitch and im currently waiting on the results. From testing I now know that if i go to the non-www version of my companies website then nothing happens it never loads. But if I go to the www version then it loads right away. I know for SEO you only want 1 of these URLS so you dont have duplicate content. But i thought the non-www should redirect to the www version. Not just be completely missing. I tried to set-up a new campaign with the defaults URL being the www version but Moz automatically changed it to the non-www version. It seems a cannot set up a new campaign with it automatically crawling the www version. Does it sound like im out the right path to finding this cause? Or can somebody else offer up a solution? Many thanks,
Technical SEO | | ATP
Ben .0 -
Which is better Title length vs. keywords?
We run a jobboard. The title tag on a page for a job is often over 70 characters. An example of one would be: " Supplier Quality Inspector (Electrical Manufacturing) Job in Orlando, FL 32809 at Pro Image Solutions | Orlando Jobs!" The company name 'Orlando Jobs!" comes at the end but is also a really good keyword e.g. 'Orlando' and 'Jobs' I am interested in suggestions as to how to make these titles better. For example take off the company name when we go over 70 characters? Move the company name to the front of the title because the company name is also good keywords? I am looking for the best way to handle the issue is all. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | JobBiz0 -
Subdomain hosted on a different server VS Subfolder on main server
We have a website developed in ColdFusion on a server does not support PHP. We have a blog for the site using WordPress (PHP), hosted on a different server, with a subdomain as the URL. (example: blog.website.com) I've heard that search engines treat subdomains as completely different websites from the main domain, so they could actually be in competition for rankings in the search engines - is that correct? I am under the impression that the traffic to the blog will not show as traffic to the main website, because it is hosted on a different server - is that right? If I am correct, I assume the best solution would be to install PHP on our main server, and put the blog in a subfolder ... or would the subdomain be OK as long as the blog is hosted on the main server? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | vermont0 -
Value of an embedded site vs. a direct link?
We have a new site that is a great resource for a serious subject (suicide). I have been getting many requests from various communities and clinics about help on embedding our site in their websites. Although I certainly don't want to keep this resource from being used as much as possible, I am curious about the SEO costs/benefit to having someone embed our site on their own website rather than provide a link to our website directly from theirs.
Technical SEO | | ron_adease1