: How to Fix this specific Google "Fetch as Googlebot" error appearing on my Webmaster Tools? Good day, I'm currently finding out why I have lost all of my website's rank in google. I don't even
Good day,
I'm currently finding out why I have lost all of my website's rank in google.
I don't even appear in google results by the domain. But other sites do link me and they appear in the google results.
I think it's all about leaving my site two months alone and finding out I had 20k in comment spam, which I completely deleted and fixed with filters and adding a new Disqus comment service.
Thing is, I added my site to Google Webmaster Tools and I'm finding out several awful things. For example, when I click in Google Fetch As GoogleBot. I receive this error message below in response to my request. And I don't even know what's the real problem and how to fix it. I simply don't get it. This is what appears:
Date: Wednesday, July 20, 2011 9:43:35 AM PDT
Googlebot Type: Web
Download Time (in milliseconds): 55
HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2011 16:43:36 GMT Server:
Apache Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Length:
248 Keep-Alive: timeout=2, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
403 Forbidden Forbidden You
don't have permission to access / on this server. Additionally,
a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an
ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Do you guys know anything about this problem ? I need to have Google crawl my site again. I used to have a really nice google result in the past three years. Now, there's nothing.
thanks,
More posts by @Hamm4606531
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Ran into the same issue and the problem stemmed from a line of code in my .htaccess file.
Particularly, I defined a page for "DirectoryIndex" that did not exist, making it impossible for Google to access a non-existent page.
Be sure to do a careful review of this file if you have problems.
thanks for all your help. They were all very helpful and gave me more information that I didn't know. I ended up checking the .htaccess file , and suddenly found some "Deny" commands with IP addresses after it.
One of the ip addresses was blocking all connections with Google.
So it was being blocked, maybe by a "Bogus" Plugin from Wordpress, or maybe someone possibly hacked into my server and changed the settings, which I find unlikely coz if they could access my account they could have easily been able to erase the website and do something funny. Doesn't seem too unreal as my website has a very high traffic demand and is about politics in my country.
So, the solution is to remove the following line from the ".htaccess" file - see below:
deny from 66.249
Thank you all.
Install the user agent switcher extension for Firefox and create a user agent for Googlebot. Then view your site and see what happens. If you get the above error then your site is configured wrong somewhere. If you don't then the issue lies with Google and you should go to their forums for support.
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