Googlebot blocked (403) in Search Console? ManteIQ now alerts you the same day

Firewalls, bot protection and security plugins decide who gets in by IP address, country and behaviour. A rule that is meant for scrapers can just as easily catch Googlebot. You open the shop, it loads, orders keep coming from returning customers, and nothing looks wrong. Meanwhile Google gets a 403 on every page it tries to recrawl.

Search Console does record it, under Page indexing, as "Blocked due to access forbidden (403)". But that report updates slowly, nobody reads it every day, and the damage arrives gradually: pages drop out one by one, impressions slide, then clicks. By the time the traffic chart makes it obvious, the block has usually been there for weeks.

The fix for a blocked Googlebot is usually one rule in a firewall. The expensive part is the time nobody knew about it.

Once a day, for every shop with Search Console connected, ManteIQ picks about 100 pages and asks Search Console's URL Inspection how Google's last visit to each one went. Thirty of them are your core pages: the home page first, then the pages that earned the most from organic search in the last 28 days. The other seventy rotate, so over a few weeks most pages that get search traffic are looked at.

When Google was refused, ManteIQ opens the page itself, as an ordinary visitor. That one extra request is what tells the causes apart.

One thing to keep in mind: URL Inspection reports Google's last crawl, not a fetch made today. A failure from a crawl older than 14 days counts as unknown, because the fix may already be live and Google simply has not come back yet.

Each alert says what Google saw (refused, server error, robots.txt, noindex), the likely cause from the table above, how many pages are hit, and how much organic revenue those pages brought in the last 28 days. That last number is what decides whether this waits until Monday.

The alert links to a card on the Traffic page. It shows the daily history of the check, the reasons, the likely cause, the revenue at risk and the state of your sitemaps as Search Console last read them. Below that is a table of the blocked pages, ranked by what they earn, each with a link to the same page in Search Console's inspection tool.

Once the block is fixed, Google still has to come back to every page. You can speed that up with Request indexing in Search Console, about ten pages a day. Tick each page as you request it and tomorrow's list picks up where you stopped. Pages that Google revisited after your request and still could not open are marked, and pages that came back are counted as recovered. The table exports to CSV.

The second alert is simpler. Every 10 minutes ManteIQ opens your home page the way a visitor's browser would, following redirects. A server error, a broken certificate, a domain that no longer resolves or no answer within 15 seconds counts as down. Three down checks in a row, about half an hour, is an outage, and a critical alert goes out with the time it started and what the server answered.

• One failed check is never an alert. A single timeout at 3 a.m. is a blip, not a reason to wake anyone.
• A 401, 403 or 429 is never counted as down. It means a firewall answered, so the server is up, even if it does not like our request.
• If half of all shops look down at the same moment, the problem is our network, not yours, and that round of checks is not recorded.

The third alert watches the outcome rather than the cause. When the last finished week's Google impressions are 30% or more below the average of the four weeks before, you get an alert with the click loss and, when the access check found a block, that block named as the most likely reason. Shops under 500 impressions a week are skipped, because at that size one quiet week means nothing. It reminds you weekly while the drop lasts.

1. Open the card and read the cause. Google only means a rule somewhere is refusing Googlebot; everyone means the site itself is broken.
2. For Google only, check the firewall, the CDN's bot settings and any security plugin, and look for blocked IP ranges or countries. Googlebot crawls mostly from the United States.
3. Fix it, then request indexing for the top pages in the table, about ten a day, and tick them off.
4. Watch the next days' checks. Pages move to recovered as Google comes back.

If Search Console is not connected yet, the Search Console guide walks through the setup, and the same steps work for any platform.

There is nothing to set up. All three alerts are already on for every shop, on the plans that include alerts, Daily and Multi-shop on the pricing page. The Google checks need Search Console connected. Alerts go to Telegram or email, whichever you chose in Settings, and each kind can be turned off there.

Your shop being open for customers and open for Google are two different things. Now both are watched, every day.