Facebook and Social Media Crawlers Getting 403 on My Site

Hosting Support
1

Hi InfinityFree Team,

My site https://missionitsolution.com.np/ is blocking Facebook’s and other social media crawlers from generating link previews.

Issue:

When I test my URLs in the Facebook Sharing Debugger, I get a 403 Forbidden error. This happens for other social media bots like Twitterbot and LinkedInBot as well.

What I’ve tried so far:

Updated .htaccess to explicitly allow facebookexternalhit, Facebot, Twitterbot, and LinkedInBot.

Updated robots.txt to allow all social crawlers.

Confirmed my .htaccess rules load correctly.

Error:

Still getting 403 from Facebook’s debugger.

It seems the block may be happening at the server/firewall level (possibly mod_security) before .htaccess rules are processed.

Request:

Can you please confirm if InfinityFree’s security rules are blocking these crawlers, and whitelist the following User Agents for my domain?

facebookexternalhit

Facebot

Twitterbot

LinkedInBot

Googlebot

This is important for proper link previews when sharing posts from my site.

Thanks in advance!

Pritam Chaulagain

2

Welcome to the community.
The link previews on social media aren’t working, probably because their crawler is being blocked. This is likely due to the security system described here:

Unfortunately, there is no way to fix this, but search engine crawlers (like Googlebot) are whitelisted