title: HEAD request receives "403 forbidden" while GET "200 ok"?
body: <p>after several months having the site disappear from search results in every major search engine, I finally found out a possible reason.</p>
  
  <p>I used WebBug to investigate server header. See the difference if the request is HEAD or GET.</p>
  
  <p><strong>HEAD Sent data:</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>HEAD / HTTP/1.1
  Host: www.attu.it
  Connection: close
  Accept: */*
  User-Agent: WebBug/5.0
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>HEAD Received data:</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
  Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 23:01:00 GMT
  Server: Apache/2.2
  Connection: close
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>GET Sent data:</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>GET / HTTP/1.1
  Host: www.attu.it
  Connection: close
  Accept: */*
  User-Agent: WebBug/5.0
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>GET Received data:</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 23:06:15 GMT
  Server: Apache/2.2
  Last-Modified: Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:58:01 GMT
  ETag: "671f91b-2d2-47ca362815840"
  Accept-Ranges: bytes
  Content-Length: 722
  Connection: close
  Content-Type: text/html
  
  // HTML code here
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now, browsers by default send a GET request (at least this is what firebug says). Is it possible that crawlers send a HEAD request instead? If so, why only this server responds with a 403, while other servers from other sites I'm mantaining do not?</p>
  
  <p>In case it's important, the only line present in .htaccess is (unless my client changed it, as they don't want to give me access to their server)</p>
  
  <pre><code>AddType text/x-component .htc
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE</strong><br>
  Thanks @Ryk. FireBug and Fiddler both send GET requests, which get 200 (or 300) responses. As expected. So I guess it's either a server bad setting (even though it's strange as the hosting is from a major company with millions of clients) or something they put in the .htaccess. They will have to let me look into their account.</p>
  
  <p>The second part of my question was if that could be the cause of the website not appearing in any search engine (<em>site:www.attu.it</em> gives no results). Any thought?</p>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE 2</strong><br>
  After some fiddling around, it turns out there was the phpMyAdmin robots-blocking .htaccess in the root directory, that caused any request from robots to be sent back with a 403 Forbidden</p>