403 Error - Google Search Console

[rob25]

Hi all,

I have searched through all the possible questions and answers to my problem, but (as far as I could see) there wasn’t any questions that specifically addresses my issue.

So my problem is this - over the past week or so, I have noticed that our ranked positions on Google have dropped considerably, specifically the homepage/index page which doesn’t appear to show on Google, when searching on desktop, but it does on mobile search (page 1, position 1).

So I have been investigating, and noticed that there were sitemap errors in Google Search Console (403 errors) however Google isn’t the most helpful when trying to diagnose these errors. I also have 3 other websites on CloudFlare, and they are also showing the same sitemap errors in Search Console, so this led me to think that it “could” be an issue with CloudFlare that is preventing my homepage from indexing [when searching on desktop] on Google search results pages.

Has anyone else experienced this issue, and if so, does anyone have a fix for this please?

Cheers,

Rob

[rob25]

Also, if this is any help, I have attached the sitemaps page from Search Console, showing the issue.

Thanks,

Rob

[sdayman]

https://community.cloudflare.com/search?q=403%20google%20search%20console

[rob25]

Hi sdayman,

I have already searched these posts - nothing of use there?

Thanks,

Rob

[anon13899255]

1. Click on those Sitemap link
2. Share the exact error message including actual URL.

[rob25]

Hi Anonymous,

All I see is what shows in the attached image:

There are two other sitemap errors too, on post-sitemap.xml and sitemap-index.xml which shows the same error message as per the above.

Thanks,

Rob

[rob25]

Hi all,

Since we have switched our NS back to our host and not CloudFlares, it appears to have resolved the issue with our 403 / Sitemap error, and our positions have recovered on Google.

This would suggest a possible issue with CloudFlare …

Anyone got any theories on this?

Thanks,

Rob

[user7872]

Yes we have the same problems with the new search console.
As soon we activate the cloudflare proxy the google search console gets a 403 forbidden when crawling the sitemap. (It works with bing, so there must be an issue with cloudflare blocking the google sitemap crawler).

[rob25]

Hi,

The only option we had to resolve this issue was to stop using CloudFlare - once we had stopped using, we re-submitted the sitemap and all errors were resolved.

We have since recovered our positions on Google too.