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I recently moved to a new host that blocks crawling to my uploads folders but (hopefully) allows the files in the folder to be crawled.

I now show many 403 errors for each folder in the uploads folder in my Webmaster Tools. For example, http://www.rewardcharts4kids.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/ shows a 403 error.

For example, I can access this file: http://www.rewardcharts4kids.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/lunch-box-notes.jpg but I cannot access the folder it is in.

My rankings went down after I moved to this host and I am wondering if:

  1. this could be the reason.
  2. is this how files/folders are supposed to be set up?
Zistoloen
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Kelly
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  • I can't imagine that the folders would have any impact on your Google ranking. You might find this catch all question to be informative: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/16941/how-to-diagnose-a-search-engine-ranking-drop – Stephen Ostermiller Aug 18 '13 at 10:45

1 Answers1

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Your website deliberately does not want anybody to browse directories - you have to navigate from one specific webpage to another using the hyperlinks in those webpages. This is true for most websites on the Internet - their web server has Allow directory browsing set OFF.

In nutshell, You don't have permission to access /wp-content/uploads/2013/07/ on this server.

Zistoloen
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Sachin Dhir
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  • If this is so common then why does Google send me messages twice a week about this? Makes me think that there is some problem here. – Kelly Aug 18 '13 at 16:42
  • Have you changed any directory privileges?? Have you checked the current permission levels? – Sachin Dhir Aug 18 '13 at 18:20
  • Google warns you when the directly is completely blocked, not just blocked from listing all files but disallowed... – JCL1178 Aug 18 '13 at 23:42
  • The crawl errors that are reported in webmaster tools should not be hurting your site as long as the errors aren't on pages you expect to be ranking: https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/RMjFPCSs5fm – Stephen Ostermiller Oct 17 '13 at 11:55