How to Fix Crawl Errors and Boost Your Website’s Performance
As a website owner or SEO professional, keeping your website healthy and optimized for search engines is crucial. One of the key elements of a well-optimized website is ensuring that search engine crawlers can easily access and index your pages. However, when crawl errors arise, they can prevent your site from being fully indexed, negatively impacting your search rankings.
In this blog, we’ll discuss how to fix crawl errors, why they occur, and the best practices for maintaining a crawl-friendly website.
What Are Crawl Errors?
Crawl errors occur when a search engine's crawler (like Googlebot) tries to access a page on your website but fails to do so. When these crawlers can’t reach your pages, they can’t index them, which means your site won’t show up properly in search results. Crawl errors are usually classified into two categories: site errors and URL errors.
Site Errors: These affect your entire website and prevent the crawler from accessing any part of it.
URL Errors: These are specific to certain pages or files on your site.
Understanding the types of crawl errors is the first step in fixing them. Let’s dive deeper into the common types of errors and how to fix crawl errors on your website.
Common Crawl Errors and How to Fix Them
1. DNS Errors
A DNS error occurs when the crawler can’t communicate with your site’s server. This usually happens because the server is down or your DNS settings are misconfigured.
How to Fix DNS Errors:
Check if your website is online.
Use a DNS testing tool to ensure your DNS settings are correctly configured.
If the issue persists, contact your web hosting provider to resolve any server problems.
2. Server Errors (5xx)
Server errors occur when your server takes too long to respond, or when it crashes, resulting in a 5xx error code (e.g., 500 Internal Server Error, 503 Service Unavailable). These errors can lead to temporary crawl issues.
How to Fix Server Errors:
Ensure your hosting plan can handle your website’s traffic load.
Check server logs for detailed error messages and troubleshoot accordingly.
Contact your hosting provider for assistance if you’re unable to resolve the issue on your own.
3. 404 Not Found Errors
A 404 error occurs when a URL on your website no longer exists, but is still being linked to or crawled by search engines. This is one of the most common crawl errors and can occur if you’ve deleted a page without properly redirecting it.
How to Fix 404 Errors:
Use Google Search Console to identify all 404 errors on your site.
Set up 301 redirects for any pages that have been permanently moved or deleted.
If the page is no longer relevant, ensure it returns a proper 404 response, but remove any internal links to it.
4. Soft 404 Errors
A soft 404 occurs when a page returns a 200 OK status code, but the content on the page is essentially telling users (or crawlers) that the page doesn’t exist. This confuses crawlers and can impact your site’s performance.
How to Fix Soft 404 Errors:
Ensure that any page that no longer exists returns a true 404 status code.
If the page is valuable, update the content to make it relevant, or redirect it to another related page.
5. Robots.txt Blocking Errors
The robots.txt file tells search engines which pages they can or can’t crawl. If certain pages are blocked unintentionally, they won’t be indexed, leading to crawl issues.