: How did Google manage to crawl my 403 pages? I had a couple private files in a directory on my school folder. You could see that the files existed by going to myschool.edu/myusername/myfolder,

@Kaufman445

The most probable reason is that the pages won't return a 403 header.

You can check that using the Web Developer Toolbar in Firefox or Chrome. The tool is located under "Information" -> "View Response Headers".

Also, the way I create my error pages is:


I create some dummy error page. Let's say 403.php.
I create an actual error page. For example error403.php.
On the dummy error page, I put the following code: <?php header("Location: /error403.php",TRUE,301); ?>
In my .htaccess, I put the following:

Options -Indexes

ErrorDocument 403 /403.php


This adds all the redirects in a proper way and makes me sure I'm getting some juice from my error pages.

This can actually be extended in an extremely cool way if your website has a search engine which uses GET requests.

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