XF 1.5 Attachment errors in GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOL

[Surendra.S]

Hi guys,

Since the XenForo installation, GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOL started showing the 403 Error Codes for Attachments.

In my website, Members can only download Attachments and Guests cannot, so Google is showing these Error messages.



What is the right way to deal with it ?

 

[dutchbb]

Show attachments to guests, there is no other way to prevent these 'errors'. They are 403, so that means that google has no access to them (permission denied) because google has same access as your guests.

Question is if it can hurt your seo, opinions are divided about this and best way is to test it if showing to guests/google gives a higher amount of visitors from search.

403 (permission denied) is the correct error code for handling this btw.

 

[Surendra.S]

Can we restrict (using Robots.txt) Google from accessing the Attachments ?

 

[dutchbb]

Can we restrict (using Robots.txt) Google from accessing the Attachments ?

Yes, you can and that could prevent the errors indeed (forgot about that)

User-agent: *
Disallow: /attachments/

If you have community or something else in your url

User-agent: *
Disallow: /community/attachments/


Xenforo also blocks attachments.
https://xenforo.com/robots.txt

This also gives googlebot more time to do other things then trying to crawl every blocked image.