SEO & Crawl Errors

Have you ever received a crawl error on your website and was wondering what it means and how can I fix it? It can be an awful feeling especially when you are trying to find something you need in a hurry. Well, before we give an overview of what crawl errors are, let’s begin by defining what a Web crawler is and then we’ll discuss certain 400 and 500 error codes (there are 1000s of error codes) and how these crawler errors can affect your website ranking.

A Web crawler, is defined as an Internet bot which systematically browses the web or World Wide Web; normally aimed at Internet indexing, meaning that search engines (SE) generally make use of keywords and metadata to supply a more practical terminology used for online searching.

Web search engines and other sites use Web crawling (spidering) to index Internet content to bring it up-to-date and they also do this for other site’s web content. Web crawlers can copy all web pages they go to for subsequent handling via a search engine which indexes the downloaded pages so the users can search a lot more proficiently.

Web crawlers can validate a reference to information or hyperlinks as well as Hyper Text Markup Language or HTML, which is used to build or create a site’s web pages.

Below you will find certain crawl errors and what happens when you receive one of these messages. In other words, the site uniform resource locator (URL) that Google could not successfully crawl or that returned an HTTP error.

Web Crawler Errors (400s & 500s) – Google & Bing Search Engines

HTTP (400s) Errors

Most of the crawler errors users we see are in the 400 range. What a user receives this type of error, it usually indicates a request failure. CloudFlare (web performance and security business) acts as a messenger then furnishes Google, from your web server, with these crawler errors. These errors may be caused by something as simple as a missing page in your online server or a bad link in your HTML. The solution will depend upon the problem encountered. Once the problem has been identified and corrected, Google will make additional attempts to crawl your website and errors will clear automatically.

401 (Unauthorized)
• Your server is refusing access to your pages and requires additional data (e.g., login and password). Verify that you are unintentionally blocking your pages behind a login/password. Think about including a disallow rule to your robots.txt so that Google will no longer attempt to crawl your pages, if intentional.

403 (Prohibited or Forbidden)

• Your server is disallowing entrance to your pages to Bingbot. Same as in the above scenario, make sure that you’re not deliberately barring certain or every Bingbot applications on your server.

404 (Not Found)

• If search engines hit a 404 error, they will attempt to check it over at regular intervals, just to make sure that it was not in case it was not a glitch or user error and the page reappears. If you’re repeatedly getting a 404 error, then it’s possible that the page isn’t actually there and other pages are actually linking to your dead URLs, which is why Google maintains following them over and over again.

• If you have moved pages or updated them, you should continuously try to put a 301 redirect to the new page that provides the best match. With the 301 redirect, SE as well as people will be directed straight to the new page. Search engines will notice that the uniform resource locator has been modified, will sooner or later revise their index with the new URL. It won’t really matter since everyone following a link to the former URL will be redirected.

• If the page continually gets 404 errors sooner or later Google will determine that the web content doesn’t exist on your site any more. If you have actually taken it off of your site, it should not have a significant effect on your rankings for the content that you still have. However, keep in mind that if the web content is there, but misplaced, you will be losing rankings.

HTTP (500s) – Internal Server Errors

HTTP errors in the 500 series reveal that an internal error has occurred on your server, but unfortunately, the Google Webmaster Tools offers only a small amount of problem-solving understanding of these types of errors. If your web server is producing (HTTP 500) errors, it can sometimes be very difficult to separate them from errors that CloudFlare may be producing. To assist you in comparing the times of any outages with the times of errors, it’s best to keep an eye on the condition of your web server.

500 (Server Error)

• This common error states that your server has given details about an internal server error and was incapable of completing our submission request. This may be due in part to a problem in your website’s code or misconfiguration.

503 (Service Inaccessible or Unavailable)

• Our request to your server was unable has acknowledged that it was unable to handle our requests. This could have been a temporary issue, in spite of this you should take a look at your logs and scripts for issues that may be performance-related.

509 (Bandwidth Exceeded)

• Your server reported that you have gone beyond your bandwidth’s capacity and it was unable to handle our submission and you need to examine your server’s construction.

Miscellaneous Errors

(Crawl politeness)

• It’s important to keep in mind that your web crawler is using another’s band-width and other resources and may receive a request for you to remove the crawl delay placing from your robots.txt. In addition, please make sure you have an optimal crawl amount setting arranged on the Bing Webmaster Tools crawl settings page.

(Domain Name System (DNS) Issues)

• When attempting to crawl your website we ran into Domain Name System (DNS) botches. These malfunctions could be the result of a server or DNS misconfiguration.

(Connection Issues)

• This could be a temporary issue but you should check your server logs to see if you are dropping requests.

Conclusion

The 400 and 500 error codes are not the only codes used in the exchange of information on the Internet. There are 1000s of error codes, but it is beyond the scope of this article.

To ensure your website’s ranking doesn’t take a hit, it is important to fix these errors when you receive them because website crawl errors can prevent your page from appearing in search results.

If you have received web crawler errors please share your comments with us on what actions you took to correct them. Or SEO score goes way up. reach us for web crawl errors help and we will make sure you