Google Ads Disapproved – “Destination Not Working” 403 error

  • Hi there,

    For quite a while now, we’ve gotten daily alerts from Google that large chunks of our ads are getting disapproved because our site destination isn’t working. However, in all of these cases, our destination is working perfectly fine. Sometimes the alert will provide us with the HTTP error code (403), so I’m assuming that’s probably the same error code they’re all returning.

    I’m trying to narrow down where this issue is stemming from. My first assumption is that a firewall somewhere is blocking Googlebot. We have hundreds of thousands of ads, so if Googlebot is checking them all at once, I can see how that would raise flags.

    We have a few different connections where a firewall could be getting triggered, so I’m just touching base with all of them to see if that is in fact the issue and, if so, we can add Googlebot to a whitelist so that it will never be throttled and hopefully resolve the issue.

    I’ve read the stickied threads, but I’m not sure if that’s related to the issue I’m having, as I don’t seem to be getting notices from WP Cerber, but rather from Google. I’m just not sure if WP Cerber is perhaps doing some kind of blocking that I’m not aware of due to the sheer mass of potential Googlebot requests at a time.

    Thank you!

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Thread Starter Leah

    (@edikitt)

    After looking into this further, I am in fact seeing that WP Cerber is blocking several Google-owned IP addresses on our site. There are many, but these seem to be the most affected:

    66.249.91.242
    66.249.75.211
    66.249.91.244

    Because of this issue, thousands of our Google ads have been getting repeatedly disapproved for months, due to the fact that when Google attempts to crawl our site to to determine that the destination is working, it’s met with a 403 error after being blocked.

    I’ve added those IPs to our whitelist, but IMO Google’s IPs shouldn’t be blocked to begin with unless specified.

    Thoughts?

    Did that work for you?

    I am facing the same issue, my website works fine but Google Ads say ‘destination not working’.

    I don’t know what I can do to fix this. Phone support is unavailable now.

    Thread Starter Leah

    (@edikitt)

    @prkspeaks

    So far so good, haven’t had a single ad disapproved since (was getting hundreds a day before). I ended up just adding all of Google’s public IP ranges to my whitelist:

    64.233.160.0 – 64.233.191.255
    66.102.0.0 – 66.102.15.255
    66.249.64.0 – 66.249.95.255
    72.14.192.0 – 72.14.255.255
    74.125.0.0 – 74.125.255.255
    209.85.128.0 – 209.85.255.255
    216.239.32.0 – 216.239.63.255

    Thanks for letting me know.

    Other than being disapproved, everything else was working in your site correct? My site prkspeaks.com/ielts is working perfectly but I still get this destination not working error.

    I do not run any firewall so there is no place to allow public IP ranges.

    Thread Starter Leah

    (@edikitt)

    @prkspeaks

    Exactly, my site is functioning perfectly other than that, as is WP Cerber itself (as in, I’m not seeing any other kinds of false positives, everything else it’s blocking looks like it should be getting blocked). No server issues, no downtime, no dips in traffic, nothing in our logs and nothing being blocked by our own server’s firewall. I never would have known there was an issue if not for the email notices from Google.

    To clarify about the IP ranges, I meant that I added those to the WP Cerber Access List under WP Cerber > Dashboard > Access Lists tab.

    I should mention though that I did first rule out a few other possible culprits. In my case it was WP Cerber, but if adding those IPs to the access list doesn’t solve the issue for you, you might try checking with your website’s hosting company and/or see if you might have other plugins installed that could be blocking Googlebot (Wordfence, for example).

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by Leah.

    Thanks a lot for this!

    This should be taken care of in the plugin natively. I know the plugin is free and I am not complaining this, but I think this is a critical issue. Anyone running google ads is at a loss the moment he activates wp cerber.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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