Support

Mandatory information about my setup:

Have I read the related troubleshooter articles above before posting (which pages?)? Yes
Have I searched the tickets before posting? Yes
Have I read the documentation before posting (which pages?)? Yes
Joomla! version: 1.5.26
PHP version: 5.2.9
MySQL version: 5.0.41
Host: www.oldottawsouth.ca
Admin Tools version: 2.2.10

Description of my issue:
I installed Admin Tools about 10 days ago. Since then I have gotten a couple of warnings from Google Webmaster Tools about "Increase in authorization permission errors". When I log in to Webmaster Tools and look at the data for Access Denied (403) errors, I see the error rate was consistent at zero per day until the day after I installed Admin Tools, at which point it jumps to a consistent 136 errors per day.

The vast majority of the failed URLs listed are of this form:
http://www.oldottawasouth.ca/index.php/component/user/?task=login&323ed0194f9c59eed6070bc7bf56ccfc=1

(but with unique strings after "task=login&")

This URL corresponds to the "Login" link in the top-right corner of my site. Is there any reason why Admin Tools would be causing an access denied error here?

(For what it's worth, it doesn't seem useful for Google to crawl that link. Still, it has been there for a long time and the errors have only just started now that Admin Tools is active.)

Thanks, Chris.

I will see what I can do about adding nofollow to the login link. The link is being generated by a module included with my JoomlArt site template, but with some digging I should be able to find the code.

As for the logs, I did already have WAF set up to log exceptions. I can't find anything in there from the google crawler, though. There are entries with similar-looking URLs, but I believe they are the result of people actually attempting to log in, not just following the link to the login form. They are listed in the AT log as "login failure", and the IPs are Chinese, Russian, etc.. -- not googlebot.

Actually, I'm not using the .htaccess maker.
I did manage to add the nofollow parameter to the login link, so hopefully that will solve the immediate problem.