Majestic Domain Verification Failed — BadGateway Error

Site verification with Majestic (previously known as Majestic SEO), can fail with certain web hosts. The error message, both in file or meta tag methods:

• Unable to download homepage
• Cause: Error requesting page at http://yourdomain.com (response code: BadGateway).
• Solution: Make sure your site name is entered correctly, and is accessible by us.

Which means that the Majestic bot is blocked from crawling, or accessing the website. This is because depending on your host, there might be restrictions how some services have access to hosted domains.

Here’s what Majestic support had to say:

Verification has failed because there appears to be a block in place against our bot from visiting your website. Requests made to your site which identify themselves as ‘MJ12bot’ are returned with a ‘406 Not Acceptable’ response. This is most likely due to security software installed on your server which has been configured to block bots, or sometimes these blocks are put in place by hosting providers to reduce bandwidth costs, but they are normally open to lifting these if a customer requires a bot to visit their site.

I went and asked HostNine, the web host that was behind these domains, to see what they would say. And they simply stated that their Apache HTTP server’s ModSecurity rules block the ‘MJ12bot’ globally.

And that there is nothing they can or will do about it.

So it really boils down to your host, for example NameCheap or Godaddy are not blocking Majestic. Leaving you with an option to either;

1. Contact your hosting company and ask them to allow Majestic
2. Change to a web hosting company that doesn’t block Majestic
3. Pay for a Majestic subscription to see stats of non-verified sites.

Or live without Majestic if you can! =)

Thanks for reading, hope this helped and you can share the post.
And questions and comments welcome below as well.