How can you identify crawl errors in your website?

1 Why are crawl errors important?

Crawl errors can indicate that your website has technical issues, such as broken links, server errors, or misconfigured robots.txt files. These issues can prevent search engines from crawling and indexing your pages, which can result in lower rankings, less traffic, and lost opportunities. Moreover, crawl errors can also affect your site's usability, as users may encounter dead ends, slow loading, or irrelevant content. Therefore, it is important to identify and fix crawl errors as soon as possible to improve your site's health and performance.

2 How to use Google Search Console to identify crawl errors

Google Search Console is a free tool that helps you monitor and optimize your site's presence on Google. One of its features is the Coverage report, which shows you the status of your indexed pages and any errors or issues that affect them. To use Google Search Console to identify crawl errors, you need to verify your site ownership and submit a sitemap. Then, you can access the Coverage report from the left menu and filter by error, warning, valid, or excluded. You can also click on each issue to see the affected URLs and the details of the error.

3 How to use other tools to identify crawl errors

Google Search Console is not the only tool that can help you identify crawl errors. Other tools, such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Ahrefs Site Audit, and Moz Site Crawl, can provide a more comprehensive and detailed analysis of your site's crawlability and indexability. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop software that crawls your site and provides various reports and metrics, such as response codes, canonicals, redirects, meta tags, and more; you can use it to identify crawl errors like 404s, 500s, noindex, or robots.txt directives. Ahrefs Site Audit is a web-based tool that crawls your site and provides a health score and a list of issues and recommendations; it can be used to identify crawl errors such as broken links, duplicate content, orphan pages, or internal redirects. Moz Site Crawl is another web-based tool that crawls your site and provides a summary of issues and insights; it can help you spot crawl errors like missing titles, descriptions, or headings, thin content, or blocked resources.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?