What are crawl errors and how do they impact technical SEO? 

Crawl errors are a major source of technical SEO issues. They impact the way search engines view your site and can result in a huge drop in your site’s visibility. Contact us to learn more about gilbertseo.net

Crawling is the process of scanning a website for content, creating an index, and then adding the URLs to that index. When a search engine’s bot crawls a website, it looks for every link on the site and adds them to its index. If a search engine’s bot encounters any problems accessing the site’s content, it reports these issues as crawl errors. 

Google has a very efficient tool called the Google Search Console that can help you identify and fix crawl errors. It also gives you a crawl report that details all of the crawl errors your site has encountered. 

There are two types of crawl errors that you will find in your search console: site errors and URL errors. The first type of crawl error is a broader one and can affect your entire site, while the second is more specific to your individual URLs. 

The most common errors that you will see in your crawl errors list are 404s and access denied pages. You should be able to decide whether these are worth fixing or not, and then work to get them fixed as soon as possible. 

404s, or “not found” errors on a page are usually the result of URLs that are no longer active or are pointing to a page that is no longer on your site. 404s aren’t a big deal in most cases, but they are still an issue that should be addressed as soon as possible. 

Internal links that are broken or pointing to a nonexistent page on your site are another type of URL issue you should look out for. These aren’t as damaging to your SEO efforts as 404s, but they can still cause a lot of confusion for users and for search engines. 

Duplicate URLs, which can be caused by inconsistencies in order, case inconsistencies, and session IDs, are another problem that can make it difficult for search engines to properly index your website. These can happen in the same page or across multiple pages on your website. 

These can cause problems when bots are trying to crawl your website because they are constantly attempting to crawl pages that have duplicate content. It can reduce the amount of time they have to crawl each page and make it more likely that they’ll miss important or unique content. 

This can also affect how search engines perceive your website as a whole because it can be hard for them to determine which pages to prioritize. 

There are many ways to deal with duplicate pages on your website, including using canonical tags, 301 redirecting, or adding a redirect to your sitemap to prevent these errors. 

If your URLs are indexed with different versions of your website, this can also create crawling problems. You can fix this by changing the name of your URLs to something that is more consistent and then updating your redirects to ensure they’re properly serving each version of your website correctly.