Server blocking google bots? getting 403 errors from search engines.

Discussion in 'Apache' started by smoothcall6, Jun 24, 2009.

  1. #1
    Server blocking google bots from seeing my my pages of my site. I keep getting 403 errors for google and yahoo bots and probably more.

    I have contacted my server provider as I am on a dedicated server and they say it is not them blocking anything and I am starting to wonder if a ex-employee got into our server and is messing around blocking bots.

    Any help or direction would be great.

    We may even have to hire someone to go in and look around to fix the problem as our knowledge is limited on the server end of things.

    Thanks,

    Keith
     
    smoothcall6, Jun 24, 2009 IP
  2. Guttu

    Guttu Peon

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    #2
    Check robots.txt file in root folder. Adding following should work most of the times.

    
    User-agent: Googlebot
    Allow: /
    
    User-agent: Yahoo-slurp
    Allow: /
    
    User-agent: Msnbot
    Allow: /
    
    Code (markup):

    Most probably every alternate line would be followed by "Disallow" tag like

    
    [code]
    User-agent: Googlebot
    Disallow: /
    
    User-agent: Yahoo-slurp
    Disallow: /
    
    User-agent: Msnbot
    Disallow: /
    
    Code (markup):
    Change this to the previous code I mentioned.
     
    Guttu, Jun 25, 2009 IP
  3. kailash

    kailash Well-Known Member

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    #3
    Also use Google Webmaster tools. It will help you to analyze the problem.
     
    kailash, Jun 28, 2009 IP