Google 403 Error on Attachments

kunik1962

Member
I was looking at my Google Webmaster Tools and noticed 152 Crawl errors all related to the my forums and in particular the attachments.

From what I can gather here is my issue:

1. To encourage user registration in order to view attachments the member must be a registered user.

2. It seems that since "google" is not a registered user it is unable to "see" the attached images so comes back with a 403 error.

Do I have any options here besides opening the forums so that unregistered users can view attachments?
 
Well the 403s in Webmaster Tools are just there to let you know Google tried to crawl those pages but couldn't, it's not necessarily a problem.. but if you want attachments indexed then you would have to allow guests to view them.
 
Well the 403s in Webmaster Tools are just there to let you know Google tried to crawl those pages but couldn't, it's not necessarily a problem.. but if you want attachments indexed then you would have to allow guests to view them.
Is that what many of you do to encourage registrations?
Or would it just be simpler to allow guests to view them and then just let them register if they choose as all our content is so great.
 
Apologies for the necrobump, but just found this thread, and it's been really useful. I've been getting the same 403 errors on my attachments, and didn't realise guests couldn't view them. We have lots of attached images in our forum, so a quick change of the guests permissions to be able to view them, and this should now be fixed.
 
While you're in there, after a vBulletin to XenForo migration, you might also want the following to your .htaccess rules in case you have posts that linked to these URL's:

# More vB fixes
RedirectMatch 301 ^/private.php http://www.example.com/conversations/
RedirectMatch 301 ^/payments.php http://www.example.com/account/upgrades
RedirectMatch 301 ^/usercp.php http://www.example.com/account/
# end vB fixes

Replace example.com with your domain name. If you have the forums in a subdir you'll have to adjust for that too.
 
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