If you frequent Google's Search Console often you may have stumbled across the crawl errors tab, an extremely important section which for the beginner can go completely unchecked. This blog should give you a basic overview of crawl errors and highlight the importance of best practice implementition and how it can affect your rankings.
The cleverly named Crawl Errors section in Search Console highlights pages on your site where Google has had dificulty crawling said page and detected a HTTP error code.
Common error codes picked up by Google are typically carry a 4XX (404 etc.)) or 5XX (503 etc.) status.
5XX status codes indicate there is an error with the server the site is hosted on, they come in the following flavours:
If you do find a bunch of these errors, shout at your web developer or hosting provider (or get us to)
400 status codes are client errors meaning you've probably fubbed up somewhere when putting in your URL or the owner of the site has made an oopsie (technical term). These can usually be fixed with appropriate redirects.
4XX errors come in a few tasty varieties, most popular being:
Soft 404s
It's extremely important that your site handles 404 errors properly. More often than not most developers might create a funny custom 404 page which instead of returning a proper 404 error status in the header returns either a 301, 302 or even 200 ok error!
This is worse than a genuine 404 in Google's eyes. If a page is broken or missing Google wants to know. To quote Google
"It's like a giraffe wearing a name tag that says "dog." Just because it says it's a dog, doesn't mean it's actually a dog. Similarly, just because a page says 404, doesn't mean it's returning a 404."
Redirect do what they say on the tin. They redirect one URL and point them to another URL. They come in two flavours: 301 redirects and 302. Both work exactly the same way but have two very different purposes and very different effects on SEO.
Want to check your site for errors? This Monthly Website Checklist will show you how...
Inbound Manager @ Noisy Little Monkey, Josh blogs about SEO, Local & Mobile, HubSpot and Inbound Strategy.
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