What are crawl errors and how do they impact technical SEO?
Crawl errors are issues that search engine bots encounter when they try to crawl your site. They can prevent your pages from being indexed or found in search results, which could negatively impact your site’s ranking.
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Crawling is the process of sending a search engine bot to your website in order to read and index your pages for search. This is a crucial part of SEO. However, it can be frustrating to find that your site is not properly indexed by Google.
There are several different types of crawl errors that may cause these problems. These include DNS errors, server errors, and robot failure.
Besides these, there are also page duplicates that can have a negative impact on the crawl ability of your website. They cause Google bots to spend more time crawling one page than another, which makes it harder for them to decide what pages should be ranked higher and prioritized for their index.
Dynamic URLs are a common issue that many non-SEO-friendly shopping cart applications have, and they can result in duplicate content and squandered link values. To fix this, ensure that every link leads to a static, readable page by using a 301 redirect.
Soft 404 errors are another type of crawl error that can occur on your website. These are usually caused by links that are redirected to pages that return a status code other than 404 or 410. These can cause Google to crawl and index non-existent URLs instead of your existing pages.
This can be a serious problem and is an important reason to ensure that all pages on your site return a 200 HTTP status code when they’re requested by Googlebot.
You should make sure that any non-existent URLs on your site don’t get redirected to any other page, and that all URLs are updated to the latest version of your content.
If these issues are resolved, Googlebot will be able to crawl and index your website more efficiently, which should increase your rankings.
The most important thing is to avoid having these errors on your site in the first place. To do this, make sure that all of your URLs are set up to use the correct permalink structure in your webmaster tool.
Alternatively, consider creating a new permalink structure for your site that doesn’t use any URL parameters to help keep your URLs tidy and optimized.
There are other ways to resolve these issues, and it’s best to consult with your web developer to find the right solution for you.
If you do encounter these crawl errors on your site, it’s a good idea to check back to see if they go away over time.
You can also use the ‘fetch as Google’ function in your webmaster tool to check whether your site has any errors that are keeping it from being indexed by Google. If you do find any issues, be sure to mark them as rectified in your webmaster tool so that search engines know they have been addressed.
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