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Identifying and Fixing Crawl Errors: A Step-by-Step Guide

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Identifying and Fixing Crawl Errors: A Step-by-Step Guide

Also known as spiders or bots, web crawlers are automated programs that browse and “crawl” web pages across the internet.

They discover and access content by following the links on your website.

Search engines rely on these crawlers to find and index content that they store in their massive databases.

The easier it is for search engine bots to navigate and index your website, the better its crawlability. If bots struggle to crawl your website, your content won’t appear in SERPs, thus limiting your visibility and SEO rankings.

Crawlability is thus a crucial factor in achieving top rankings in SERPs. However, crawl errors can hinder the process and create barriers between your website and search engine algorithms.

The outcome? Indexing gaps and reduced organic traffic.

Therefore, identifying and fixing crawl errors is a must for maintaining a high-performing website. This guide will throw light on how to identify and fix crawl errors.

What Are Crawl Errors?

Crawl errors happen when search engine bots encounter problems while accessing and indexing your website pages.

Google categorizes crawl errors into the following two main categories –

  1. Site errors
  2. URL errors

Site errors affect your entire website, while URL errors are specific to individual pages.

  1. Site Errors

Site errors occur when search engines can’t access any part of your website. These errors negatively impact your entire site, preventing search engines from crawling and indexing your pages.

Three key types of site errors include DNS, server, and robots.txt errors.

  • a) DNS Errors

They occur when the domain cannot be resolved to an IP address. This implies that search engine crawlers cannot reach the server.

For instance, if the DNS settings for a website are misconfigured or the domain is temporarily down, search engines will log DNS errors.

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  • b) Server Errors (5xx)

Server errors, indicated by a 5xx HTTP status code, happen when the server fails to process a request from a search engine bot. This prevents the website page from loading appropriately. This might happen because of server downtime, overload, or other issue.

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  • c) Robots.txt Fetch Errors

The robots.txt file specifies which areas or pages of the website are allowed to be crawled. These errors happen when search engines cannot retrieve the robots.txt file.

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Here’s a quick example.

If “https://example/robots.txt” is incorrectly configured or returns a 404 error, search engines will not know which website pages to crawl. This leads to indexing issues.

  1. URL Errors

URL errors are specific to individual pages that search engines cannot access. This can prevent such pages from being indexed.

  • a) 404 Error (Not Found)

This error happens when a specific page on the website is requested but cannot be found. This might happen because of broken or incorrect URLs.

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For instance, if a user or bot tries to visit “https://google.com/abc”, and the page no longer exists without a redirect, a 404 error will be logged.

Most businesses use custom 404 pages today to keep the user experience intact.

For instance, here’s what you see on our website, cnvrTool, in case of a 404 error.

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  • b) Soft 404 Error

This occurs when a page returns a 200 OK status (which means everything is OK), but the search engine bot gets a “Page Not Found” message.

For instance, https://cnvrtool.com/services could return a 200 status code but display a “Page Not Found” message. This will lead to a soft 404 classification.

This often occurs due to thin content, duplicate content, JavaScript issues, broken database connections, or missing files.

Here’s what you see in Google Search Console (GSC) with soft 404 errors.

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  • c) 403 Forbidden Error

This error occurs when the server denies a crawler’s request. This means the server understands the request, but the crawler can’t access the URL. Issues with server permission often lead to these errors.

Here’s what a 403 forbidden error looks like.

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  • d) Redirect Loops

They occur when a website page continuously redirects to another page. This creates an endless loop and prevents crawlers and users from accessing the content.

For instance, if “https://cnvrtool.com/old-page” redirects to “https://cnvrtool.com/new-page,” which in turn redirects back to “https://cnvrtool.com/old-page,” a redirect loop will occur.

This eventually blocks access to both pages.

Steps to Identify Crawl Errors

Google Search Console (GSC) is a powerful, free-of-cost tool by Google that can help you identify crawl errors and maintain your website’s performance.

Here’s a step-by-step process to get started –

Step 1: Log In to Your GSC Account

Go to your GSC account and click the “settings” option on the left sidebar. This will open up the settings menu, where you will find the “crawl stats” section.

Step 2: Navigate to Crawl Stats

Click the “OPEN REPORT” option. You’ll find it next to the “crawl stats” tab.  This will help you access complete data about how Googlebot crawls your website.

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Step 3: Review Crawl Activity and Errors

The crawl stats report will reflect your website’s crawl activity. Scroll down to check whether the Google bot encountered any crawling errors on your website.

Step 4: Inspect the Error

Click on any error, such as server errors, DNS errors, and more, from the list.

For instance, click on 5xx server errors, as shown in the screenshot below.

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Once you select 5xx server errors, you will get a list of all affected URLs where Googlebot noticed a server error.

Here’s what the GSC will reflect.

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Step 5: Find the Root Cause

Find what’s causing specific errors on your website. For instance, if you see a server error, check with your hosting provider to ensure there are no server issues with capacity. Similarly, for DNS errors, ensure your DNS settings are configured appropriately.

Step 6: Address the Errors

Once you’ve identified the root causes, fix the errors and use the “Validate Fix” button to notify Google that you have resolved all the errors. We will discuss the steps to fix crawl errors in the upcoming section.

Pro Tip: Leverage an Advanced SEO Crawler

While GSC is a helpful tool to identify crawl errors, it has several limitations. For instance, GSC might not work well for larger websites with deep structures. Besides, GSC does not crawl your website in real-time. So, it takes time before new errors are reflected in the reports.

Most importantly, it offers limited insights into the causes of crawl errors.

That’s when you need an advanced SEO crawler tool like JetOctopus.

JetOctopus is a powerful SEO crawler tool that offers in-depth and actionable insights into your website’s crawlability and overall performance.

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Unlike GSC, this SEO crawler tool crawls every URL and offers real-time insights into crawl errors, page load times, duplicate content, and more.

With JetOctopus, you get a detailed analysis of server responses, including causes of broken connections, timeouts, and overloaded servers. It also offers a section to analyze robots.txt configurations in detail. This way, you’ll get a comprehensive view of the errors and their causes.

The best part is it offers suggestions to combat the crawl error and improve your website performance.

What’s more? JetOctopus can seamlessly detect orphan pages harming your crawl budget.

 

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JetOctopus helps you optimize your website’s crawl budget by pinpointing duplicate, non-indexable, and poor-quality pages that waste crawl resources.

Log into JetOctopus and start a full site audit.

Steps to Fix Crawl Errors

Now that you’ve identified the crawl errors on your website, the next step is to fix them.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to resolve different crawl errors and make your website crawlable and indexable.

  1. Fixing DNS Errors

How to Fix Them:

  • Go to your DNS settings and check if there’s an issue. Ensure your website’s domain name points to your hosting server.
  • If the DNS error persists, contact your domain provider to check for outages or misconfigurations.

  1. Fixing Server Errors (5xx)

How to Fix Them:

  • Increase your server’s resources (RAM, CPU) to manage high traffic.
  • Check your server logs to figure out why the server is failing.
  • Contact your hosting provider to help improve server performance or uptime.

  1. Fixing 404 Errors (Not Found)

How to Fix Them:

  • If any of your website’s pages have been moved to new URLs, set up 301 redirects to the new pages.
  • Audit your website and work on broken links (internal or external) pointing to missing pages.
  • Create a helpful 404 error page with working links to your website’s popular content. This will keep the user experience intact.

  1. Fixing Soft 404 Errors

How to Fix Them:

  • Return a true 404 status code for non-existent pages on your website.
  • If the page is relevant, update the content adhering to E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) standards.

  1. Fixing Redirect Errors

How to Fix Them:

  • Ensure all redirects go directly from the old URL to the new one without any unnecessary steps in between. This is especially crucial when migrating your website from one platform to another.

For instance, if you are migrating from Drupal to WordPress, you might notice redirect errors due to old URLs. Make sure to map your old URLs to their new WordPress counterparts to eliminate redirect loops.

  • Check redirection rules to eliminate loops by updating redirect paths.

  1. Fixing Robots.txt Fetch Errors

How to Fix Them:

  • Test Your Robots.txt. Leverage free-of-cost yet powerful tools like Google’s robots.txt testing tool to check if your robots.txt file is accessible.
  • Ensure that crucial pages on your websites are not being disallowed from crawlers.

  1. Fix 403 Forbidden Errors

How to Fix Them:

  • Ensure that all your file and folder permissions are correct to allow access.
  • Check your .htaccess file for misconfigurations, like blocking access to several files or IP addresses. Edit any problematic rules.
  • Ensure your website has an index page (like index.html or index.php) in the root directory. Add it if it’s missing.
  • Deactivate or remove any problematic plugins (for instance, in WordPress) that may be causing the error.

  1. Fixing Sitemap Issues

How to Fix Them:

  • Ensure your XML sitemap is updated with all the relevant pages.
  • Submit the updated sitemap through Google Search Console. This ensures all the pages on your website are being crawled.

Request a Re-crawl and Monitor Your Site Continuously

Once you’ve fixed all the crawl errors, request Google to re-crawl your website. This will help confirm that the issues have been resolved.

Use the “Request Indexing” feature for affected URLs in Google Search Console. If you use SEO crawler tools like JetOctopus, directly re-run the crawl to verify the fixes.

That’s not all.

Monitor your site continuously. This will help you frequently catch and resolve crawl errors and maintain a well-optimized website.

The outcome? Improved SEO performance and top rankings in SERPs!

Pro Tip: Maximize Your Website’s Health with cnvrTool’s Comprehensive SEO Audit Service

With cnvrTool, you get holistic solutions to maximize your website’s SEO performance. Our experienced SEO professionals offer a 360-degree audit of your website. We deliver insights that go far beyond identifying crawl errors.

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  • Website Analysis: We thoroughly examine your website’s performance and technical issues.
  • Keyword Research and Analysis: Our team of experts identifies high-impact keywords to boost your rankings.
  • Competitor Analysis: We help you stay ahead by performing competitor analysis.
  • On-Page and Off-Page SEO: We ensure each element of your website is optimized.
  • Backlink Analysis: We check the quality of your backlinks and identify growth opportunities.
  • Transparent Reporting: We offer actionable, easy-to-digest reports that keep you informed every step of the way.

Contact us today for more information.

Summing up

Ensuring your website is free from crawl errors is pivotal to improving its visibility, crawlability, and overall SEO performance.

So, implement the steps shared in this guide to identify and fix the crawl errors.

We’re sure the solutions will help you offer a seamless experience to your users while allowing search engine bots to navigate and index your site more effectively. All the best!

Author bio

Lucy Manole is a creative content writer and strategist at Marketing Digest. She specializes in crafting engaging content on digital marketing, e-commerce, and the broader SaaS landscape. Beyond writing and editing, Lucy enjoys devouring books, whipping up delicious meals, and exploring new destinations.

 

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