Bug Webmaster Tools alert: Increase in authorization permission errors

[Tony Dragani]

First, thanks for creating this awesome product. Since I installed it in May, the number of pages indexed in Google has grown from 26,000 to 34,000, which is a far better result than I had hoped for.

I have run into a problem, though. When I log into Google Webmaster Tools, I am now receiving the following alert:

Increase in authorization permission errors
Google detected a significant increase in the number of URLs we were blocked from crawling due to authorization permission errors.

When I investigate further, I see that the Googlebot crawler is encountering 403 errors when attempting to access private areas on my forum. This began almost immediately after I installed DragonByte SEO in May.

My guess is that before installing this product, when Google attempted to access one of these pages no error code was passed, but now a 403 error code is. Is that correct?

I believe that this is due to the following setting:

(Pro) HTTP Code: "No Permissions" Error
You can choose the HTTP response code for "No Permissions" vBulletin error pages here.
Recommended: 403

The problem is that the number of these errors are growing on a daily basis. For every private area on my forum, there are countless "access denied" errors using a variation of forum names. For example:

forums/brainstorming-and-planning/
forums/brainstorming-and-planning/ ?s= 6287cf9bbf1becaf2c27172df70b12cf
forums/brainstorming-and-planning/ ?s= 6d5cd950809d7ea0a7daf9a38caa8153
forums/brainstorming-and-planning/ ?s= ce89306b804c8f18422370d39572dcbd

(Please note: I had to add spaces around "?s=" to get these to display in this post)

I'm not sure what all of these variations involving "?s=" are all about. I'm using vbOptimise Pro with guest caching, if that has any bearing on things.

My concern is that this growing number of crawl errors will eventually hurt my rankings in Google. Should I be concerned?

Could I stop Google from reporting these errors simply by leaving the "(Pro) HTTP Code: "No Permissions" Error" setting blank? Would there be any adverse consequences if I did so?

Also, are all of these "?s=" variations something that I should be worried about?

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[Fillip H.]

This is working as intended. You are supposed to use those error codes to alert search engines to pages they cannot index, in order to avoid duplicate content.

To elaborate; if hundreds of pages with different titles had the same content (i.e. the no permissions login screen), then this would get your site penalised.

 

[bzcomputers]

One option is to add all your non-public forums to your robots.txt as disallowed. The errors relating to those forums in Webmaster Tools should then go away (eventually).

Example:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /forum/brainstorming-and-planning/

 

[Fillip H.]

All that would do is create an "increase in unreachable pages" error instead Both of these methods will make the error go away eventually when they stop trying to crawl those pages.