A few days ago I discovered through Google Webmaster Tools that some of my sites were unreachable by Google. In particular Google reported my homepage as unreachable and many of my sub-pages returned the same 403-6 error.

After checking my website both with various browsers and response grabbers located around the world I determined that the problem was definately not with the way I had designed the website or configured the hosting.

The HTTP 403-6 error means that an incoming request has been denied (Forbidden) because the IP address is banned or rejected in some way. Initially I tried to determine if this was because of some response error on my part; this was not the case.

I checked my server logs and could see the same errors showing up on every request that came from the GoogleBot (incidentally all requests were on the same IP). I notified my hosting provider and eventually the problem was rectified and the IP address used by GoogleBot at that point in time was unblocked.

I re-submitted my sitemaps and shortly afterwards the errors started to disappear from Google’s Webmaster Tools portal. I hoped that I had got to the root of the problem in time.

The next day while routinely checking websites I discovered that the homepages had disappeared from Google’s search results. Initially I thought that the sites had dropped on their keyword matches but “site:URL” checks showed the actual pages had been dropped.

It has taken 2-3 days for these pages to reappear in the search results and I am still waiting for some pages to come back in. Personally I found the timing to be very bad as I am trying to build Google’s confidence in my websites.

This all points to one of my main tips for SEO. It doesn’t matter about anything else if Google etc cannot see your website. Choose your hosting company carefully.

AR

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!