I took over the admin responsibilities for a PHPBB forum many years ago. By default, PHPBB allows Googlebot to crawl the site and has it added to the BOTs group.
It's only if you have changed either .htaccess with or you deny the US country code (.htaccess)
or you have BrowserMatchNoCase "Googlebot" bad_bot environment variable (.htaccess)
or some other site parameters that Googlebot would get a 403 Access Forbidden.
Also check your site's robots.txt file. Google prefers disallow (nothing), instead of allow (everything).
It's only if you have changed either .htaccess with
Code:
Deny from 66.249.64.0/24or you have BrowserMatchNoCase "Googlebot" bad_bot environment variable (.htaccess)
or some other site parameters that Googlebot would get a 403 Access Forbidden.
Also check your site's robots.txt file. Google prefers disallow (nothing), instead of allow (everything).
Code:
User-agent: GooglebotDisallow:User-agent: Googlebot-imageDisallow:Statistics: Posted by SQLnovice — Thu Apr 24, 2025 1:51 pm