What are crawl errors and how do they impact technical SEO?

Crawl errors are the result of a variety of factors, from server issues to CMS failures to changes in URL structure. These issues prevent Googlebot from crawling certain pages, which could negatively impact your website’s search engine rankings and overall user experience. 

(Searching in Google “Landing page optimization“? Contact us today!)

Luckily, there are several ways to fix crawl errors. First, you’ll want to check your sitemap for errors. If you don’t have one, Google recommends using an XML sitemap, which can be found at the following link: 

You can also use the Index Coverage report in your Google Search Console to find errors on your website. This will provide you with information about how many errors you have and how they’re being fixed. 

Then, you’ll need to look for “not found” 404 errors on your site. These are not as bad for your SEO as you might think, according to Google. Rather, 404 errors indicate that there is a problem with the page that is being requested by the search engine. 

How to fix these errors?

If you can’t get the 404 error to go away, you’ll need to configure your 404 page to return a different response code. For example, you could set up a custom 404 page or configure your theme to display a generic 404 page with a link back to the original page. 

Finally, you’ll need to close the pages from indexing or delete them if they don’t have content. The latter will cause the search engines to spend less time viewing non-existent pages on your site, which isn’t good for your rankings. 

How to fix the 301 redirect issue?

You’ll need to make sure that every link on your website leads to a page, rather than another 404 page. This is particularly important if you’ve used a 301 redirect to move users from one page to another. 

There are two main types of crawl errors: site errors and URL errors. The former is more serious and affects the entire site. 

They should be addressed immediately, as they can hurt your promotion efforts and cause your website to lose ranking in search results. 

URL errors are similar to site errors, except that they only apply to a specific URL. These are usually easier to maintain and fix, so they’re a less serious problem. 

The other type of crawl error is a “server error”. These are usually caused by an error on the website’s servers. If the Googlebot cannot connect to your server, it will give up. This is often a temporary problem and should be resolved as soon as possible. 

In addition, if there are a lot of server errors on your website, this can make it difficult for the search engine to crawl all of the pages on your site. As a result, it will take longer for your new pages to enter the Google index. 

Ideally, you should be using an XML sitemap, which will allow Googlebot to easily crawl all of your website’s pages and keep them up-to-date. However, not everyone has the time to do this, so if you have a website with lots of errors on it, be sure to prioritize fixing those issues and keep your XML sitemap up-to-date.