What are Crawl Errors?
Crawl errors occur when a search engine bot, such as Googlebot, tries to access a page on your website but is unable to do so. These errors prevent search engines from properly crawling and indexing your content, which can negatively affect your site’s visibility in search results.
Crawl errors are typically reported in tools like Google Search Console and are divided into two main categories:
- Site Errors: Problems that affect the entire website (e.g. server issues, DNS errors)
- URL Errors: Issues with specific pages (e.g. 404 Not Found, soft 404s, redirect errors)
Why Crawl Errors Matter
If search engines cannot access or understand your pages, they cannot index them. This can result in lost rankings and traffic. Identifying and resolving crawl errors is a core part of technical SEO and site maintenance.
Key reasons crawl errors are important:
- Ensure full indexing of your content
- Prevent ranking loss due to inaccessible pages
- Maintain user trust and reduce broken links
- Support site health and crawl efficiency
- Detect deeper technical issues early
Fixing crawl errors helps search engines and users access your content smoothly.
Example in Use
A business checks Google Search Console and sees that several key landing pages are returning 404 errors due to broken internal links. After updating those links and resubmitting the affected URLs, the errors are cleared and the pages are re-indexed within a few days.
Regular crawl error monitoring helps catch issues before they impact SEO performance.
Related Terms
- Google Search Console
- 404 Error
- Indexing
- Robots.txt
- XML Sitemap