• majorAlexa

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI
          Moz Local

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Technical SEO
        4. Subdomain 403 error

        Moz Q&A is closed.

        After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

        Subdomain 403 error

        Technical SEO
        2
        5
        1318
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • WeAreDigital_BE
          WeAreDigital_BE Subscriber last edited by

          Hi Everyone,

          A crawler from our SEO tool detects a 403 error from a link from our main domain to a a couple of subdomains. However, these subdomains are perfect accessibly. What could be the problem? Is this error caused by the server, the crawlbot or something else?

          I would love to hear your thoughts.
          Jens

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Roman-Delcarmen
            Roman-Delcarmen @WeAreDigital_BE last edited by

            no at all

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • WeAreDigital_BE
              WeAreDigital_BE Subscriber @Roman-Delcarmen last edited by

              Hi Roman,

              Thanks for your answer!

              It's a commercial tool.

              I checked the robots.txt file and .htaccess, but didn't saw any problems.
              As you say, the problem can just be caused by the user-agent.

              If so, this will not affect my SEO efforts, right?

              Roman-Delcarmen 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • Roman-Delcarmen
                Roman-Delcarmen last edited by

                Which tool are you using is this a custom tool or commercial tool such as Screamingfrog?

                WeAreDigital_BE 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • Roman-Delcarmen
                  Roman-Delcarmen last edited by

                  These are all for client errors. That means the page wasn’t found and something is wrong with the request. Whatever is happening though, the issue is typically on the client side:

                  403: Forbidden, So In your case, the first place that you need to check is your .htaccess and your Robots.txt file and make sure that they are not blocking any crawler or at least the crawler of your tools.

                  For example, some Hosting providers block all the crawlers that are not Google or Bing to save resources. So is usual that Roger (Moz Crawler) has problems to crawl a page that is blocked on the server side. Usually, Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush has this kind of problem so in summary

                  • Make sure your .htaccess and your Robots.txt is not blocking your crawler
                  • Make sure your hosting is not blocking your crawler
                  • If all the above does not work try to modify the user-agent of your tool

                  Hope this info helps you with your problem

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                  • 1 / 1
                  • First post
                    Last post

                  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.

                  • See all categories

                  Related Questions

                  • awilliams_kingston

                    520 Error from crawl report with Cloudflare

                    crawler cloudflare rogerbot 520 server error

                    I am getting a lot of 520 Server Error in crawl reports. I see this is related to Cloudflare. We know 520 is Cloudflare so maybe the Moz team can change this from "unknown" to "Cloudflare 520". Perhaps the Moz team can update the "how to fix" section in the reporting, if they have some possible suggestions on how to avoid seeing these in the report of if there is a real issue that needs to be addressed. At this point I don't know. There must be a solution that Moz can provide like a setting in Cloudflare that will permit the Rogerbot if Cloudflare is blocking it because it does not like its behavior or something. It could be that Rogerbot is crawling my site on a bad day or at a time when we were deploying a massive site change. If I know when my site will be down can I pause Rogerbot? I found this https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/troubleshooting/general-troubleshooting/troubleshooting-crawl-errors/

                    Technical SEO | | awilliams_kingston
                    0
                  • Taiger

                    ?_escaped_fragment_= Duplicate error in Webmaster

                    Hi I am not sure where this came from ... ?escaped_fragment= But in webmaster we are seeing hundreds of pages with this and thus webmaster is saying that we have Pages with duplicate title tags How do I fix this, or remove it. Regards T

                    Technical SEO | | Taiger
                    0
                  • A_Fotografy

                    Yoast SEO. After set up 404 error pages

                    Hello all, Something strange happened with my blog site. I recently signed to MOZ tools. Initially everything was fine, but during my last crawl I got loads of 404
                    pages. Few days ago I was tweaking some settings in SEO plugin according to this post https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success What I noticed was that 404 pages were coming from my blog posts, but for
                    some reason category was missing in those posts. For example this link is 404
                    https://a-fotografy.co.uk/inchcolm-island-wedding-photography-bailie The one with category is https://a-fotografy.co.uk/wedding-pictures/inchcolm-island-wedding-photography-bailie/ So basically for some reason category was missing. Please let me know how can I fix this instead of doing hundreds of
                    redirects now. Thank you,
                    Regards,
                    Armands

                    Technical SEO | | A_Fotografy
                    0
                  • Oxfordcomma

                    Increase 404 errors or 301 redirects?

                    Hi all, I'm working on an e-commerce site that sells products that may only be available for a certain period of time. Eg. A product may only be selling for 1 year and then be permanently out of stock. When a product goes out of stock, the page is removed from the site regardless of any links it may have gotten over time. I am trying to figure out the best way to handle these permanently out of stock pages. At the moment, the site is set up to return a 404 page for each of these products. There are currently 600 (and increasing) instances of this appearing on Google Webmasters. I have read that too many 404 errors may have a negative impact on your site, and so thought I might 301 redirect these URLs to a more appropriate page. However I've also read that too many 301 redirects may have a negative impact on your site. I foresee this to be an issue several years down the road when the site has thousands of expired products which will result in thousands of 404 errors or 301 redirects depending on which route I take. Which would be the better route? Is there a better solution?

                    Technical SEO | | Oxfordcomma
                    0
                  • schof

                    Should we move our documentation off subdomain?

                    Background: We have a popular open source e-commerce platform at http://spreecommerce.com.  Right now the documentation is on http://guides.spreecommerce.com.  We have "edge" documentation (for stuff that's not yet released) on http://edgeguides.spreecommerce.com but since it's largely duplicative we've told google not to index any of the edge stuff (via robots.txt). Question: Should we consider moving the guides under the main website under /docs or something like this?  There's a ton of great content that people often read to learn more about the platform.  Seems like we might be diluting our juice a bit to have it on a separate domain.  WDYT?

                    Technical SEO | | schof
                    0
                  • TheKrazyCouponLady

                    429 Errors?

                    I have over 500,000 429 errors in webmaster tools. Do I need to be concerned about these errors?

                    Technical SEO | | TheKrazyCouponLady
                    0
                  • mistat2000

                    500 Server Error on RSS Feed

                    Hi there, I am getting multiple 500 errors on my RSS feed. Here is the error: <dt>Title</dt> <dd>500 : Error</dd> <dt>Meta Description</dt> <dd>Traceback (most recent call last): File "build/bdist.linux-x86_64/egg/downpour/init.py", line 391, in _error failure.raiseException() File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/twisted/python/failure.py", line 370, in raiseException raise self.type, self.value, self.tb Error: 500 Internal Server Error</dd> <dt>Meta Robots</dt> <dd>Not present/empty</dd> <dt>Meta Refresh</dt> <dd>Not present/empty</dd> Any ideas as to why this is happening, they are valid feeds?

                    Technical SEO | | mistat2000
                    0
                  • themegroup

                    Robots.txt file getting a 500 error - is this a problem?

                    Hello all! While doing some routine health checks on a few of our client sites, I spotted that a new client of ours - who's website was not designed built by us - is returning a 500 internal server error when I try to look at the robots.txt file. As we don't host / maintain their site, I would have to go through their head office to get this changed, which isn't a problem but I just wanted to check whether this error will actually be having a negative effect on their site / whether there's a benefit to getting this changed? Thanks in advance!

                    Technical SEO | | themegroup
                    0

                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                  Start my free trial
                  Products
                  • Moz Pro
                  • Moz Local
                  • Moz API
                  • Moz Data
                  • STAT
                  • Product Updates
                  Moz Solutions
                  • SMB Solutions
                  • Agency Solutions
                  • Enterprise Solutions
                  • Digital Marketers
                  Free SEO Tools
                  • Domain Authority Checker
                  • Link Explorer
                  • Keyword Explorer
                  • Competitive Research
                  • Brand Authority Checker
                  • Local Citation Checker
                  • MozBar Extension
                  • MozCast
                  Resources
                  • Blog
                  • SEO Learning Center
                  • Help Hub
                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                  • How-to Guides
                  • Moz Academy
                  • API Docs
                  About Moz
                  • About
                  • Team
                  • Careers
                  • Contact
                  Why Moz
                  • Case Studies
                  • Testimonials
                  Get Involved
                  • Become an Affiliate
                  • MozCon
                  • Webinars
                  • Practical Marketer Series
                  • MozPod
                  Connect with us

                  Contact the Help team

                  Join our newsletter
                  Moz logo
                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                  • Accessibility
                  • Terms of Use
                  • Privacy

                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.