“Access is denied” error when crawling content with SharePoint or browsing local server

When crawling your local SharePoint site you may receive the following error message:

Access is denied. Check that the Default Content Access Account has access to this content, or add a crawl rule to crawl this content. (The item was deleted because it was either not found or the crawler was denied access to it.)

This can happen even if the account has the necessary permissions to crawl the site. This error is caused by what is know as the “loopback check”. The loopback check is basically a security “feature” which won’t allow a local IIS website to be accessed using a FQDN. This prevents an attack from pretending to be local thus bypassing certain restrictions.

Unfortunately, it also prevents your crawler from accessing local sites if they are using a FQDN.

Microsoft offers two workarounds here. You can either turn off this behaviour completely (not recommended) or you can exclude your site from this check. Here is method 2 from the above link:

1. Set the DisableStrictNameChecking registry entry to 1.
• Locate and click the following key in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters

• On the Edit menu, click Add Value, and then add the following registry value:

  Value name: DisableStrictNameChecking
  Data type: REG_DWORD
  Radix: Decimal
  Value: 1

2. In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key:

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\MSV1_0

3. Right-click MSV1_0, point to New, and then click Multi-String Value.
4. Type BackConnectionHostNames, and then press ENTER.
5. Right-click BackConnectionHostNames, and then click Modify.
6. In the Value data box, type the host name or the host names for the sites that are on the local computer, and then click OK.
7. Quit Registry Editor, and then restart the IISAdmin service.