AutoMapIt Site Map Creation

[brookhill]

What is the significance of this 403 on the link checker report?

Also, I note that there are MANY 404 errors for pages that have been long since removed. How can that be?

Thanks!

[MaxPowers]

Hello Mary,

403 means 'Forbidden' and is commonly sent when a link goes to the directory, but directory access is turned off. In other words, the link should be going to a filename.

It is also sent when content is found, but the server rejects the connection. Typically, this happens when you need to enter authentication into a login box... like when a site is protected by .htaccess

For the 404's to pages that have been removed... I would suspect that you still have links to these pages somewhere on your site. AutoMapIt is informing you which page contains the link and which link is broken in that report.

Another tool that may help you is to enter your 'broken link' into the Link Mapper tool here at AutoMapIt. This tool was designed for a customer to answer this question... where is that link coming from?

It is possible that the link exists on your old sitemap file and that the Broken Link Checker is reporting those links. These would have been updated once your newest sitemaps were published, but they were found during the crawl, so they show up in your report. If the broken links come from your sitemap file... those were fixed when AutoMapIt updated your latest sitemaps.

-Shawn

[brookhill]

Thanks Shawn: as to the 403's, is this bad? Should I do something about it? If so - what?

[MaxPowers]

any links on your webpages that lead to a 403 should use a rel="nofollow" in the HTML code.

[a href="someURLthatreturnsa403.html" rel="nofollow"]