Identifying and Resolving Crawl Errors in Organic Search

Every content writer and SEO wants their webpage to get a higher rank on the search engine result page (SERP). Crawling plays a crucial role in this purpose, so before understanding crawl errors. It is a process in which a search engine sends a group of bots, commonly known as crawlers or spiders, in order to find newly updated content. So in order to get a higher rank in SERP, it is important that search engines can crawl and index your web page.

What are Crawl Errors?

Crawl errors occur when search engine bots cannot read and index your content while crawling. Search engines can’t properly index and crawl when this error occurs. Errors prevent the page from being indexed and errors page won’t appear in Google searches which reduces the traffic in your website results decreasing the visibility and website’s organic ranking. It is crucial to monitor the crawling issue using different tools like Google Search Console.

Types of Crawl Errors

As there are many variant of crawl errors. Categorizing the crawl errors group the similar crawl errors on the basis of its impact on indexing. This helps in monitoring and gives a better understanding of errors. There are two types of Crawl errors site errors and URL errors:

1. Site errors

This errors occur when search engine bots are unable to access your whole website. It’s a broad term that include errors like server error, DNS(Domain name system) error, Robot error( search engine unable to find and read robots.txt file of a website).

2. URL errors

These errors occur when search engine bots are unable to access a individual or a specific page. The errors relate to this are soft 404, not found, blocked and forbidden URLs, incorrect URL structure and many more.

Why Crawl Errors Matter?

Crawl Errors can negatively impact your website visibility as this error prevent these bots from accessing and indexing your web page, this can decrease the ranking of a website. If search engine can’t find the relevance information then how can they deliver that webpage in SERP, it will also impact your new pages.

These error also effect user experience(UX) like when they visit your website and finding links that giver error like 404 error, not found etc. they may get dissatisfied from your content and may leave the website because the golden rule of SEO is to always take care of content and user experience. These error may cause inappropriate indexing of the webpage.

Identifying Crawl Errors

Search engine like Google provides a free tool Google Search Console to identify crawl errors. This helps you to monitor and improve the website’s presence in search result. You can access the crawl errors in the dashboard of search console. Search console has two section for crawl error: Site errors and URL errors, this really helps you to find crawl errors because these two crawl errors are different as mentioned in types of crawl errors.

It provides a list of URLs that was not found during crawling and also display server error, so that you can easily find URLs and fix them. There also exist other tools other than Google Search Console are such as Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMrush.

Where to look for crawl issues in Google Search Console

Crawl errors can prevent your page from being indexed and this can reduce your ranking of web page on SERP. In the Google search console, visit the coverage section. The first page of this console is the summary page that shows the indexing error on your website. Errors prevent page from being indexed and errors page won’t appear in google search results that can negatively impact the traffic on your website.

There are four section on this page

• Error: In Error section, Error like DNS error, Server errors, 404 errors can be found these types of errors prevent the page from being indexed and it will not appear in google search result that impact the traffic in your website.
• Valid With warnings: In Valid with warnings section pages may or may not be shown on the google search index depending on the issue. For example: It is also possible Google to find a page that are indexed but can be blocked by robots.txt for this you have to configure the robot.txt files.
• Valid: In valid section pages have no error and all the pages in this section are indexed, pages will appear in google search result.
• Excluded: Pages in the excluded section were not indexed and will not appear in the Google search console. For example, the page having no indexed directive, the page having duplicate content, the pages simply not found and returning a 404 error.

Fixing Crawl Errors

We know that there are two types of Crawl errors Site errors and URL errors, we will discuss one by one how these errors can be fixed:

How To Fix Site Error

Site error is a type of crawl errors and is very powerful error because it prevent search engine bot to crawl entire website. You can watch this error in dashboard of google search console. This error include DNS error, Server error and Robots.txt fetch error. For DNS(Domain Name System) you can visit fetch as google tool of google console and click on fetch.

If the problem still persist then connect with your DNS provider. For server error you can check the server setting and robert.txt file can be fix by configuring robot.txt file.

How To Fix URL errors

URL errors can be find in the coverage section of google console. Errors like submitted URL has crawl issue, soft 404 error, 404 error are come under URL errors. Submitted URL has crawl issue can be solved by unlocking the robot.txt file, you can also test whether robot.txt file is blocked or not by clicking the test robot.txt blocking tool of console.

If everything is fine but still showing this error then click on request indexing. Soft 404 error means the page has little or no content that can be solved by inspect URL. 404 error is basically a response of missing page this can be fix by either restore the missing page or redirect old URL with new URL or update the internal links or sitemap to show the correct URL.

Ways to locate and correct crawl issues using other tools

There are other tools other than google search console where you can find and fix the crawl issue for example: Within a MOZ Pro campaigns visit the all crawled pages you can check your crawl errors in has issue section. you can investigate the error and get helps in fixing that error by visiting the analyze section. Errors like Search engines blocked in robots.txt can be fix by Bing Webmaster Tools robots.txt tester also.

Preventing Crawl Errors

Crawl Errors deeply affect your website ranking. So it is very important to prevent crawl errors so that user can get better experience as well as your website become search engine friendly. Here are some points regarding preventing Crawl Errors:

• Monitor Your Website on a Regular Basis: Monitor the google console on a regular basis so that you aware with the crawl errors and set up email notification to receive updates whenever new crawl issues are found.
• URL structure: URL structure must be logical, sort and descriptive. To determine the better version of pages using different URL parameters, use canonical tags.
• Use appropriate Redirection: Use 301 redirection in order to redirect old or moved page to new page.
• Broken Links: In order to prevent crawl errors you must take care of broken links check your broken links on a regular basis and update or remove that broken links.
• Implement Canonicalization: If multiple URLs indicate same content then it is important to use canonical tag that points the preferred version of your page.
• Remove Duplicate Content: In order to higher ranking in SERP and for better User Experience we must avoid duplicate content.

Monitoring and Regular Maintenance

Resolving the crawling errors are the most important to rank a page in SERP. In order to make your business successful this is one of the area you have to work with experience consultant who monitor your crawl errors on a regular basis and resolve that errors so that you website become search engine friendly and this also enhance the user experience.

Conclusion

For better visibility of your website on search engine it is important to address all the crawl errors and fix them immediately. Therefore Identifying and resolving crawl errors is extremally beneficial in organic search.