January 28, 2009 by Jack Fox
Every now and then we get people coming to us completely distraught because their site has been removed completely from the Google index due to a 403 error. For those staring at their computer screens scratching their heads, a 403 error is when a server does not let a client connect to a particular site. If Google detects one in the server header if will simply ignore that site. Infuriatingly, the HTTP protocol does not require the server is not to provide a reason for a 403 error at all, which can make this situation difficult to resolve.
So, how do you fix a problem like this? How do you get rid of your 403 error and get Google crawling your site once more.
Well, as is so often the case, there’s no one silver bullet. However, you must start by simply checking your site’s server headers. There’s a plug-in available from Firefox that can help you with this. When checking server headers you’re looking for them to have ‘200 OK’ status, this is the standard response you get from successful HTTP requests and indicates that everything’s just fine there.
(More tomorrow)
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