The RSS Blog

News and commentary from the RSS and OPML community.

A few months ago, I ran into this situation where I got a 403 error when I clicked thru to a friend's blog from a Google search. I refreshed, the blog loaded and I forgot about it until about 2 weeks ago. I ran into the same error, again via click-thru to another friend's blog from a Google search. The error? HTTP 403 with the text "access from http://www.google.com... has been denied". I removed the query parameters from the Google link. I was gonna tell the person, but a refresh cleared the problem and I never recalled the error until today. Again, via click-thru to another blog from a Google search, I get HTTP 403 access from http://www.google.com... has been denied. I tied all three incidents together and realized they were all running Blogware. I then Googled 403 Google Blogware and found that others have experienced this problem as far back as early January. I confirmed the problem on multiple browsers; IE6 and Firefox. The problem is not regional either, as Coolz0r confirmed similar errors in Europe. The bug seems to be caused by referrer SPAM filters on steroids. I sent an email to a friend who works at Tucows.

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