403 forbidden error how to solve them

[ClaireH-184886]

hi, i have been using a great tool today called screaming frog which was shown to me by Thomas Zickell

when i used the tool i found some worrying things for my site www.in2town.co.uk. what i have found is, i have a large number of 403 forbidden status on my home page and i do not know why

here is an example

http://www.in2town.co.uk/emmerdale/emmerdale-debbie-hits-rock-bottom

it loads fine but on the tool it shows it as an error and shows it as having no meta tags or anything but there is meta tags in there

can anyone please let me know how to solve this and why it has happened

many thanks

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Tim,

Glad it helped. It might be worth asking your host what kind of features they have for preventing flooding attacks, there are various ways of addressing them on the server side that most hosts will have enabled in one way or another. Unless you have a specific issue with these kind of attacks, it seems to me that this part of the module is causing more harm than good as it is now.

[ClaireH-184886]

thank you for this. i have turned it off and will speak to sh404sef to find out what they can do about it, as i am worried about having the security feature, but as you said that was the problem and now the site is showing fine, there are no errors showing.

many thanks for this. I hope other people who are having this problem get to read this post as they must be going through what i am going through. many thanks for all your help and the solution

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Tim,

Did you ever get to the bottom of the issue mentioned in this question? It is almost certainly the same problem.

Have a look at this page and try either turning of the sh404SEF anti flooding feature or else boosting the max number of requests allowed. http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?p=1368937

The anti flooding part of this component is basically blocking requests for pages if it thinks someone is trying to do a dos attack on your site. The current setup seems to be too sensitive and is bloocking screaming frog after the first few requests, quite possibly blocking the google bots, maybe blocking the moz crawler also, so certainly something you should address.