[Resolved] Bing Bot being blocked after installing new theme

[Norman]

Hello,

I’ve gone back and forth with both my web host (LiquidWeb) and Sucuri to see why I’ve received notices from Microsoft about the Bing Bot returning 403 messages on some of my content.
https://www.screencast.com/t/xuZ69c5smcW (email from Bing)
https://www.screencast.com/t/8vbXigkhePpQ (Bing Webmaster tools report)

This happened directly after putting my new theme on and the latest response I received from LiquidWeb today is this:

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After doing some testing, the 403 response issue on the /feed pages appears to be caused by a plugin. I tested temporarily disabling all plugins on churchletters.org, and after doing so, I was getting a 200 (successful) response on one of those pages.

I tested with https://churchletters.org/church-letters/education-letters/back-to-school-high-school-student/feed. You can see if you visit that URL the “<status>403</status>” line. After disabling plugins, the correct information was showing and the response was 200 rather than 403. Unfortunately, I’m not seeing any errors that are pointing to which plugin specifically is causing the issue. The plugins will need to be disabled one by one and then test viewing one of the links, such as https://churchletters.org/church-letters/education-letters/back-to-school-high-school-student/feed, to see which one is causing the problems.

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I can easily go through my plugins one by one, but can you think of any reason this would be happening?

I came across this article which made me think perhaps it’s something with the theme:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-fix-wordpress-rss-feed-errors/
Specifically, this section: https://www.screencast.com/t/aoDxVWf0

Before I go the plugin route one by one, do you have any thoughts on this?

Thank you,
Norman

[Norman]

Hello,

I just found out that it is the “Disable Comments” plugin I have to remove the comments sections from my posts.

I had just installed that with my new theme as it was the only way to remove comments from my site.

Perhaps I can find another plugin that won’t conflict.

I appreciate your help as always.

[Leo]

Hi there,

Shouldn’t need a plugin to remove comments:
https://docs.generatepress.com/article/removing-comments/

Let me know if this helps 🙂

[Norman]

Hi Leo,

Ok, great. Thank you.

[Leo]

No problem 🙂

[Norman]

Hi Leo,

Ok, great. Thank you.

Actually, since they were enabled previously, the plugin was preventing all future comments from showing but if it was enabled on posts before, they would still show.

I used the plugin referred to at the bottom of your article.

Perhaps another one might not conflict?

[Leo]

You shouldn’t need the plugin unless you want to disable them under certain conditions (pages/posts only).

To remove existing comments, the instructions in #2 should work.

[Norman]

Hello,

I recently just noticed that my sitemap is missing? Is there a chance this happened with the new theme installation?

https://churchletters.org/sitemap_index.xml

[Leo]

Wouldn’t be theme related.

Maybe check with YoastSEO?

[Norman]

Thanks. I checked with LiquidWeb and followed a few tips on the Yoast site and it seems to be there now. I’m not sure what happened, and Yoast usually doesn’t reply very quickly.

I think I’m good now and thanks for getting back to me again. I think this Bing Bot problem is resolved as well since I found the plugin that was causing the problem. Probably need to find a different one to remove the comments.

[Leo]

No problem 🙂

[Author]

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