What Are The Common Crawl Errors And How To Fix Them?

What distinguishes a smoothly operating website from one that struggles to rank in search engines? Often, the difference lies in how effectively a website manages crawl errors.

If you analyze the most successful websites, you'll notice that they share common practices in identifying, addressing, and preventing crawl issues, ensuring that their content is easily accessible to search engines.

We recently did this analysis to identify common crawl issues that many websites face and then designed strategies that you can use to fix them.

The good thing, though, is that anyone—even beginners—can implement these strategies.

Let’s start with some basics.

What Are Crawl Errors?

These occur when search engine bots, like Googlebot, encounter problems while trying to access and index pages on your website.

These errors can prevent search engines from properly understanding and ranking your content, potentially affecting your site's visibility in search results.

Nobody wants to get these errors, especially when they’ve put in much work trying to rank on Google.

They can be divided into two categories:

• Site errors
• URL errors

Site errors affect your entire website and indicate that the search engine could not connect to your server or access your robots. txt file.

On the other hand, URL errors affect specific pages and indicate that the search engine encountered a broken link, a redirect error, a blocked page, or a server error.

More on the types later. Next.

Why Crawl Errors Matter for SEO

Understanding why these errors matter for SEO is the first step in maintaining a healthy, crawlable website that performs well in search engine rankings.

Here's why they matter:

1. Indexing issues: If search engines can't crawl your pages, they can't index them. This means your content won't appear in search results, regardless of its quality.
2. User experience: These errors often reflect issues that also affect human visitors, leading to poor user experience and higher bounce rates.
3. Wasted crawl budget: Search engines allocate a limited "crawl budget" to each site. Errors waste this budget on problematic pages instead of valuable content, and once this happens, it will take some time before Google can send the bots back to crawl your site.
   

4. Link equity loss: If important pages can't be crawled, you lose the SEO benefits of internal and external links pointing to those pages.

5. Negative impact on rankings: Google considers site quality in its ranking algorithms. A high number of errors can signal poor site quality.

6. Reduced site freshness: If new or updated content can't be crawled, search engines may view your site as less fresh and relevant.

When you promptly address these errors, you ensure that search engines can access, understand, and properly rank your content, improving your site's visibility and performance in search results.

To put more meat into the bones, let’s have a more in-depth look into these errors.

Common Types of Crawl Errors

At the beginning of this article, we mentioned that there are two major types of errors. In this section, let’s look at them in more depth.

A. What Are Site Errors?

1. DNS Errors

DNS errors occur when the search engine bot can't resolve a website's domain name to its IP address.

They happen when:

• Your DNS configuration is incorrect or outdated
• DNS servers are experiencing outages or connectivity issues
• Your domain name has expired
• Recent DNS record changes haven't fully propagated across the internet

2. Server Errors (5xx)

Server errors indicate problems on the server side, preventing the bot from accessing your site.

They occur due to:

• Server overload or crashes
• Misconfigured server software
• Database connection issues
• Coding errors in server-side scripts
• Resource limitations (e.g., memory exhaustion, CPU overload)
  

3. Robots.txt Blockages

Robots.txt blockages happen when the robots.txt file incorrectly prevents crawlers from accessing parts of your site.

These errors arise when:

• Your robots.txt rules are overly restrictive
• There are syntax errors in the robots.txt file
• Important directories or files are accidentally blocked
• The robots.txt file is misconfigured after a site structure change
  

4. Security Issues (e.g., HTTPS Errors)

Security issues relate to problems with the site's SSL/TLS configuration.

They occur because of:

• Expired SSL certificates
• Mismatched domain names on certificates
• Incomplete certificate chains
• Weak or outdated encryption protocols in use
• Mixed content issues (loading HTTP resources on HTTPS pages)
  

B. What Are URL Errors?

1. Redirect Loops

Redirect loops happen when a series of redirects lead back to the original URL, creating an infinite loop.

These errors are caused by:

• Misconfigured .htaccess files
• Poorly implemented URL rewriting rules
• Conflicts between plugins or CMS settings
• Incorrect redirect chains after site restructuring

2. 404 Not Found Errors

404 errors mean that the search engine bot couldn't find the requested URL.

They happen when:

• You've changed the URL of a page without updating old links pointing to it
• You've deleted a page or article from your site without adding a redirect
• You have broken links–e.g., there are typos or errors in the URL
• External sites are linking to non-existent pages on your domain
  

3. Redirect Errors

Redirect errors occur when redirects are not implemented correctly.

They happen due to:

• Incorrect redirect status codes (e.g., using 302 instead of 301)
• Redirects pointing to non-existent pages
• Chained redirects that exceed the crawler's limit
• Temporary redirects that should be permanent (or vice versa)
  

4. Soft 404 Errors

Soft 404 errors happen when the server returns a 200 code but Google thinks it should be a 404 error.

So, what causes soft 404 errors?

• The JavaScript resource is blocked or can't be loaded
• The page has insufficient content that doesn't provide enough value to the user
• The page isn't useful to users or is a copy of another page (duplicate)
• Missing files on the server or a broken connection to your database
• Custom error pages that return a 200 status code instead of 404

Now that common errors are behind us, let’s see how you can identify the errors on your site.

How to Identify Crawl Errors on Your Site

1. Using Google Search Console to improve site SEO

Google Search Console is a free tool that helps you monitor your site's presence in Google Search results.

Here's how to use it to identify the errors:

• Log in to Google Search Console and select your property
• Navigate to the "page indexing" report under "Why pages aren’t indexed"
• Look for errors in the "Error," "Valid with warnings," and "Excluded" sections
• Click on specific error types to see affected URLs and details
• Use the "URL inspection" tool to check individual pages for issues
• Set up email notifications to be alerted about critical errors
  

2. Third-Party SEO Tools

Many SEO tools can help identify crawl issues across your site. Some often provide more detailed reports than Google Search Console. Others can simulate crawls from different search engines.

Here's how to use some popular tools:

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

• Download and install the tool
• Enter your website URL and start the crawl
• Check the "Response Codes" tab for errors like 404s
• Look at the "Directives" tab for robots.txt issues
  

SEMrush

• Log in and go to the Site Audit tool
• Set up a new project for your website
• Run the audit and check the "Issues" tab for errors
• Use the "Crawled Pages" report for a detailed view of each URL
  

3. Conduct Regular Website Audits to Improve Site SEO

Conducting regular website audits is crucial for identifying and preventing errors. Here's a basic process for a website audit:

• Set a regular schedule (e.g., monthly or quarterly)
• Use a combination of Google Search Console and third-party tools

Next, create a checklist of items to review, including:

• Crawl issues and status codes
• Robots.txt file
• XML sitemap
• Internal and external links
• Page load times
  

This process is pretty important because of the following reasons:

• They help you catch issues before they become serious problems
• Regular audits allow you to track changes over time
• They can reveal patterns or recurring issues on your site
• Audits often uncover other SEO issues beyond just errors
  

Strategies to Fix Crawl Issues

Recently, in our Legiit forum, people asked a couple of questions about how to fix these errors.

To answer that. There is no one-size-fits-all solution when solving common SEO problems or fixing crawling errors, but for most common cases, we'll try to answer the best way to address them.

#1. Resolving DNS Issues

DNS issues can prevent search engines from accessing your site. Here's what to do:

• Check your DNS configuration with your domain registrar
• Ensure your domain name is renewed and not expired
• Verify that your DNS records are correctly set up
• If you've made recent changes, allow time for DNS propagation (up to 48 hours)
• Use DNS lookup tools to confirm your records are correct and accessible

#2. Fixing Server and Connectivity Issues

Server errors can significantly impact crawling. To address these:

• Monitor server performance and upgrade resources if necessary
• Check server logs to identify specific error causes
• Ensure your hosting plan can handle your site's traffic
• Optimize your website's code and database queries
• Set up server monitoring to alert you of downtime or issues
  

#3. Updating and Testing Robots.txt

A misconfigured robots.txt file can block crawlers. Here's how to fix it:

• Review your robots.txt file for any overly restrictive rules
• Use Google Search Console's robots.txt tester to validate your file
  

• Ensure critical pages and resources aren't accidentally blocked
• Remove any syntax errors in the file
• After making changes, resubmit your robots.txt in Google Search Console
  

#4. Addressing 404 Errors

404 errors occur when pages can't be found. Here's how to fix crawl issues:

Redirecting Broken Links

• Identify broken links using tools like Google Search Console
• Set up 301 redirects for pages that have moved
• Update internal links to point to the correct URLs
• Reach out to external sites linking to non-existent pages and ask them to update their links

Creating Custom 404 Pages

• Design a user-friendly custom 404 page
• Include navigation options or a search bar on the 404 page
• Ensure the custom 404 page returns the correct 404 HTTP status code
• Add links to popular or related content on your 404 page
  

#5. Handling Redirect Chains and Loops

Redirect issues can confuse crawlers and waste crawl budget. To fix:

• Identify redirect chains using crawling tools
• Simplify redirect chains by pointing directly to the final destination URL
• Fix any redirect loops by identifying the cause (often in .htaccess or CMS settings)
• Ensure all redirects use the appropriate status code (usually 301 for permanent redirects)
  

#6. Ensuring Proper HTTPS Implementation

HTTPS issues can cause security warnings and affect crawling. Here's what to do:

• Install a valid SSL certificate from a trusted authority
• Ensure your entire site is served over HTTPS
• Set up proper redirects from HTTP to HTTPS versions of your pages
• Update internal links to use HTTPS
• Check for mixed content issues and update any HTTP resources to HTTPS
  

Best Practices to Fix Crawl Issues. Final Thoughts

There you go. We've discussed everything you need to know about common crawl issues and common SEO problems you're likely to encounter as you put your site to compete with the rest of the world.

As a general rule of thumb, remember to do the following:

• Keeping an eye on your site is key to catching issues early
• Keeping your sitemaps updated and current
• A fast site is a crawlable site. Keep on optimizing your site speed and performance

Sounds cool right? Get this done and you'll be well on your way to maintaining a healthy, crawlable site that search engines will love.