What Is Crawl Error?
A crawl error is a problem that stops a search engine bot like Googlebot from reaching or understanding a page on your website. The bot tries to visit the page but something blocks it or goes wrong.
Definition
A crawl error is a technical issue that happens when a search engine cannot successfully request, load, or process a page or part of a website. Because of this, the page may not be crawled or indexed correctly, which can hurt how often it appears in search results.
Crawl errors can happen at two main levels:
- Site level the bot has trouble reaching your whole website. For example server is down or domain does not work.
- URL level the bot has trouble reaching one page or a group of pages. For example the page gives a 404 not found.
Why Crawl Error Matters
Crawl errors matter because search engines must crawl your pages before they can rank them. If bots cannot reach or read your pages, those pages might:
- Not be added to the index at all
- Drop out of search results over time
- Show old content because the bot cannot see updates
Too many serious crawl errors can also be a sign of a weak or broken site structure, which can lower trust and waste your crawl budget the amount of crawling a search engine is willing to do on your site.
How Crawl Errors Work
Here is what usually happens during a crawl error:
- The search engine finds a URL to visit from links or a sitemap.
- The crawler sends a request to your server asking for that page.
- Something breaks in the process, so the crawler does not get a proper response.
- The search engine logs this as a crawl error and may report it in tools like Google Search Console.
Common types of crawl errors include:
- DNS errors search engine cannot find the server that hosts your site.
- Server errors 5xx server is overloaded or misconfigured and cannot answer the request.
- Not found errors 404 the page no longer exists or the URL is wrong.
- Soft 404 errors page looks missing to Google but returns a success code instead of a 404.
- Blocked by robots.txt your robots.txt file tells bots not to crawl a page or folder.
- Access denied login walls or other rules stop bots from seeing the content.
Crawl Error vs Other SEO Errors
Crawl errors are not the same as other SEO problems:
- Crawl error the bot cannot reach or load the page correctly.
- Indexing issue the bot reached the page but chooses not to index it, for example low quality or duplicate content.
- Ranking issue the page is indexed but does not rank well, for example weak content or poor links.
Crawl errors happen first. If crawling fails, indexing and ranking cannot happen at all for that page.
Example of Crawl Error
Imagine you had a blog post at:
https://example.com/blog/best-books
You delete that post and do not set a redirect. Now when Googlebot visits that address, the server returns a 404 not found code. This is a crawl error. Google Search Console may show it under page not found issues. If many important pages return 404 codes, your traffic can drop because those pages no longer show in search results.
FAQs
- How do I find crawl errors?
Use tools like Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, or server logs. In Google Search Console, check the Pages and Crawl stats reports. - How do I fix crawl errors?
Fix broken links, set 301 redirects for moved pages, repair server and DNS issues, update robots.txt rules, and make sure important pages return the correct status code. - Are all crawl errors bad?
No. Some 404 pages are normal, for example old pages you chose to remove. Focus on fixing crawl errors on important pages that should be visible in search. - How fast do crawl error fixes show in Google?
It can take from a few hours to several weeks. You can request re crawling in Google Search Console to speed things up, but final timing is up to Google.
