The crawl errors are something that you need to closely evaluate your website. Because it is one of the crucial aspects of technical search engine optimization which can not be ignored. And it is one of the ranking factors for the website to get ranked on the search engine. It is important to understand what are crawl errors and their types.
As you all are aware that Google and any other search engine will be having multiple parameters to determine the quality of the website. And when we are talking in terms of technical SEO, crawl errors are one of the major factors in evaluating the score. Because search engines hate websites whenever they encounter technical issues. This leads to a crawl error which creates a negative effect on your site.
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What are crawl errors?
Crawl errors are the process when the search engine is unable to crawl the pages of your website. Generally, it starts with search engines releasing crawlers that check each and every component of your website and when it is unable to access the data, this leads to a crawl error.
A search engine crawler checks every link that has been published on the website. Whether it can be an internal link or external link, it follows all the links that you have integrated within the web page. It also checks what kind of media files that you have uploaded on the web page.
The crawl error is directly influenced by the indexing process. If there are any errors found on a particular website, like you might have intentionally or unintentionally blocked the webpage script, you will not be able to get your website indexed until it’s sorted out.
Different types of crawl errors
Whenever the search engine robot can’t access the web page of a website, it is due to multiple reasons. This is why you need to understand which are the different types of crawl errors that are being affected on your website.
1. Website errors
Website errors are something that is affecting your entire website. Here are some of the instances for site errors to happen.
A. Issue from search engine crawlers
Whenever search engine robots try to access a particular web page of a website, if it finds that you are using robots.txt with blockable elements, then the search engine crawler can’t access your website. The robots.txt directly commands search engine crawlers whether to access your website or not. And when it is unable to access, you may find the notification through your webmaster account.
If there is any error found from the robots.txt, it directly notifies you as an error named 200 or a 404 error.
You have the complete authority to direct the search engine which are the web pages that can be accessed by crawlers and which are the pages to be avoided. You need to use this power wisely so that you don’t mess up the performance of your website.
The robots.txt also allows you to control the crawl budget and crawl frequency. These are some much-required features for sites to get indexing. It is difficult for a search engine crawler to access your website without the presence of a robots.txt file. As it will not understand what it needs to do when they crawl your website.
B. DNS misconfiguration
You can generally find the DNS details while you are registering for a new domain. The DNS is something that acts like a medium that has to be connected between your domain name and the hosting server. The DNS details are generally generated from the hosting side so that you can use them for your domain name to link with it.
DNS is commonly known as a domain name system. And when you are configuring the DNS details on your domain name, you need to insert the details correctly as they have specified. Failing to do so, you will not be able to propagate the domain and server which causes the crawl error.
If there is any misconfiguration, the problem will arise in two ways. First is the DNS timeout and the second is the DNS lookup.
The DNS timeout is something that happens when a particular search engine is unable to access your website. Because the search engine will allocate a specific time for a crawler to crawl a website. And when it is unable to do within that time frame, the DNS timeout issue will reflect.
The second issue that you generally find is the DNS lookup. This generally happens when a search engine can’t find your domain name registered on the internet.
C. Faults in the server
Do not get confused with DNS errors and server errors. Because they are completely two different segments in which the search engine crawler was unable to access your website.
Faults in the server generally happen due to the lack of bandwidth or whether there is any downtime with the server performance. This generally gets your website timed out and the search engine can’t wait forever to wait for your website to go live.
There can be many instances for server errors to happen. It generally starts with the multiple requests that are received for the end server. And it can also be the bandwidth that has been allocated to your website. That is the reason you always need to prefer a server from a reputed company that has futuristic capabilities.
Some of the common server errors can be server timeout, truncated headers, server no response, connection timeout, connection reset, connection failed, and connection refused.
Suggested read: Website crawlability issues and solutions
2. URL errors
The URL errors are completely different from the website errors. URL errors are specific only when the website can be accessed by search engine crawlers. Here are some of the instances that arise whenever the search engine robots face any problem during the crawling process.
A. Page not found
Page not found is one of the most common issues that you encounter whenever there is any broken link on your website. This generally happens when you submit the URL for the search engine to crawl your web page but it can’t access it because the page is broken or the link.
Search engines dislike whenever there is a broken link or broken page found on the website. It is one of the major factors that directly influence the quality of the website, indexing process, and ranking signal.
No matter when you encounter such an issue, you need to immediately find which page is causing the 404 error and sort it out. This can happen due to sometimes the internal link being broken. Or whether there is heavy usage of resources on a particular web page that is unable to fetch the data.
You can use the 301 redirects to a separate page if the 404 error page can’t be fixed within a few minutes. As it will be receiving traffic organically and the users do not want to see a broken page which affects the user experience.
B. Soft 404 error
The soft 404 error is something that confuses people who are using the webmaster account. The main reason for soft 404 error to be caused is due to lack of content that is used on a particular web page. This generally happens due to blank web pages or it hosts files that can’t be read by crawlers.
You need to first check the pages that have been labelled as soft 404 errors and see if there’s any content or not. If it has little content, you may want to add more so that it will be resourceful from a search engine perspective as well as helpful for the audience. If you have content already hosted on the web page and you find it right, you may suggest the search crawler to recrawl the web pages again. This generally happens due to some issue with the search engine bots.
C. Access denied
If you are hosting web pages that have been password protected or the hosting server is blocking the particular web page, then you can generally find this issue labelled as access denied.
You need to first check which are the web pages that are causing the issue. Then you need to ascertain whether the web pages should be indexed or not. Later, use the nofollow and noindex tag for the web pages that shouldn’t be crawled.
If the issue is from the hosting provider, you need to reach out to your hosting support team to whitelist the search engine crawlers bots for accessing your website.
D. Not followed
The reason for this issue to arise is because the search engine crawlers are unable to access the given URL. It can happen due to multiple reasons such as using iframes and flash files on the web pages. It is one of the major causes of concern as search engine crawlers will not be able to understand what it is all about.
The second issue can be due to infinite redirection loops. This can happen because of multiple redirections that you have used for URLs. There are few web admins who use it as a Black hat SEO technique to drive traffic from one website to another.
The third issue is due to the usage of redirected links within the site map. This is something that website owners fail to realize even after solving the infinite redirection issue. Because it has already been recorded within the sitemap and it keeps on happening until you remove the redirection URLs from the sitemap.
E. Mobile-specific URL errors
The mobile-specific URL errors generally arise when the smartphone bots can’t access the website. This can be due to the usage of flash elements and excess of animation files that is hindering the process of mobile bots.
Another issue can be if you are using a separate website domain for mobile users. You need to see whether it is user-friendly on the mobile phone.
The best way to deal with mobile-specific URL errors is to check how well it is responsive in cross-browser and cross devices. And also double-check whether there are any blockable elements in the robots.txt file.
Suggested read: What is a mobile-friendly website?
F. URL that contains malware
If the search engine finds out that the web pages of your website contain any malicious tools or files that can affect the end-user will be termed as malware error. This is a serious issue that can even directly lead to your website getting penalized by search engines.
You should ensure that there is no such malware related resources hosted on the website. It is usually practised by unethical website owners who target to generate user databases or inject any malicious items on their system.
Concluding thoughts
When you have successfully understood what are crawl errors, it’s now your turn to fix them one by one. Do not get pressured or feel that it is the end of the road. You need to have patience while fixing it. Give some time for the search engine crawler to analyze your website again and get better authority. When a search engine finds that your website is free from site errors and URL errors, then you can see an instant boost in website ranking and indexing process.