Cannot explain 403-errors on client site

Howdy,

Happens not often but I am stuck and kindly request my peers help!

http://ccfgb.co.uk is not being indexed by search indexes.

If you run this site with/without SEO enabled (makes no difference) you get a 403 on http://web-sniffer.net/ :

HTTP/1.1 : Status: HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden

HTTP/1.0 (with Host header) : Status: HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden

HTTP/1.0 (without Host header): Status: HTTP/1.1 200 OK

You might point this to our server settings but we have on this particular server over 180 sites running (all Joomla!) and none has this issue so it looks like this is not server settings for sure since we would have the same issue on all sites (including our own which is not the fact) See:

http://www.intodns.com/ccfgb.co.uk (the reverse MX records do not influence the header info being denied

Any help is duly appreciated?

Cheers

Leo :)

< Previous Post

Comment by HarryB on May 10, 2011 at 10:58am: Anything different about the robots.txt file for this site??

Comment by Marco Cunha on May 14, 2011 at 3:01pm: Looks like that particular site always renders a 403 with the page content being the actual page it should display with a 200 instead of a proper error message. Something in the request pipeline is sending that, and I would look for plugins or something else. Looking at error logs for PHP may help. Search Engines probably ignore the page because of the 403 returned. Compare with other sites you have that render HTTP 200's. Something has to be different.

Comment by Leo Lammerink on May 17, 2011 at 11:00am: @ Harry: no..identical to all Joomla sites on this server

@ Marco: PHP-error logs do not give info related...

None of the other 179 sites is rendering this issue. We had intensive contacts with Liquidweb (where our servers are located) but also they see no issue.

What we have discovered though is that the OLD .asp website is still being indexed and that the 301-redirect set on that website is not being honored.......all is still being indexed as .asp on Google webmaster tools. (Xmap latest uploaded but seemingly ignored: 76 links recognized but only 1 indexed) So I am not sure what to do expect but for asking a review by Google?

Thanks folks!

Comment by Leo Lammerink on May 26, 2011 at 11:09am: We have resolved the issue. This issue has been caused by a plugin installed. Here is the review as posted on JED:(no wall of shame but a severe warning to all of you to stay away of the plugin! unless the flaw is resolved!)

Though the extension works as expected on "members-level" it comes with a major flaw. The plugin has a setting stating " Disallow search spiders" or similar (last line in right column) which in combination with a 403-button (on/off) causes the following effect:
* NO W3C validation (throws a 403 error(!) at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator
* No SEO indexing (Google/Bing/Yahoo throws all submitted sitemap links with 403-errors
* NO Google fetching in webmaster tools (403)
* Error_log Joomla shows headers already send by this plugin resulting also in PHP-errors (bad coding)

The moment this plugin is disabled all works well. If you review the actual code your will see where this plugin goes wrong...

Strong advise: Rewrite the plugin to make it compliant since the functionality is perfect but the code execution is a disaster...

We have been trying to find the reason why the site was not being indexed ) see: http://www.alltogetherasawhole.org/profiles/blogs/cannot-explain-40...)and we finally found it through the error logs php-warnings (headers already send by plugin)

Rather sorry for the review since the plugin is useful in its intention!

FYI.

Leo

Comment by Leo Lammerink on May 26, 2011 at 11:12am: BTW: forgot: Plugin is http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/access-a-security/site-acce... (Members Only)

Cannot explain 403-errors on client site

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