Google says it is best not to use a 403 server status code and if you are, to switch it to use a 404 server status code instead. Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that a 403 is "weird" but it ...

Gary Illyes from Google posted on Google+ that he sees many large sites lose a ton of their pages in the Google index for misusing 403 status codes when they should be using 503s. He said: We've seen ...

Google is warning against using 404 and other 4xx client server status errors, such as 403s, for the purpose of trying to set a crawl rate limit for Googlebot. “Please don’t do that,” Gary Illyes from ...