Question on PHP site menu returning error 403

[lc1884]

Hi

I built my site in html and I am just in the process of changing it to php so I can have my main navigation menu in an includes file to make site wide changes easier.

I have come across a snag when I check the site with the w3c validator and also spider it with my html editor all the links in the includes file return an "error 403 link forbidden"

When I navigate the site online everything works fine, but spidering it still gets the error. I'm worried that the google bot's will have the same problem and miss most of my internal links.

Has anyone else come across this and found a solution. All my coding is self taught so I hope my explanation isn't to confused.

[Mike]

what's the url? pm me if you don't want to post publicly and I'll look at it for you.

[lc1884]

Thanks Mike for all your help and suggestions to get this problem sorted, everything is working fine now

[Mike]

So everyone else knows and in case anyone ever has this problem in the future, the issues with lc1884's site was that he was using relative links in his php include file instead of ABSOLUTE links.

Relative link - ../folder/page.html

Absolute link - xhttp://www.yoursite.com/folder/page.html

The code would parse correctly when you view it in a browser but any spider would receive the page along with a 403 (do not try request again) error.