When search engines fail to crawl through your website’s page, it leads to crawl errors. Google fails to understand the content or structure of your website when this happens and that can prevent your pages from being indexed and appearing in search results. So, how do you fix them?
URL errors and site errors are the two primary kinds of crawl errors and search engine marketing experts have extensive experience navigating around them. We will explore both of them and find out the most efficient and quick solutions to fix them.
Tips from white-label SEO outsourcing companies to fix common crawl errors:
1. DNS Errors
DNS stands for Domain Name System. Every website has an IP(Internet Protocol) address that acts as its unique address on the internet for identifying itself from other computers. DNS matches the IP addresses to domain names and facilitates communication between people and computers on the internet. DNS errors happen when:
- DNS servers don’t reply to the search engine’s request on time, or
- When the DNS server can’t locate your domain name and hence your website can’t be reached by the search engine.
When DNS errors happen, it’s best to check with your hosting or DNS provider.
Read Also: 5 Factors Affect the WordPress Loading Speed
2. Poor Site Architecture
As the name suggests, the way your website pages are organized is your site’s architecture. With a good site architecture, you can reach each and every page from the homepage with a few clicks. If any pages don’t link back properly to the homepage, the search engine classifies them as orphan pages.
Orphan pages are completely isolated and that causes crawlability issues for the search engine since it can’t determine the structure of your website. To fix this issue, online marketing companies create a proper hierarchical site structure with proper internal links. For instance, if you have a blog on SEO, make sure that it has category pages that link to the homepage and relevant posts that link to each category.  Â
3. Robots.txt Error
Before Google crawls your website, it simply scans through the robots.txt file. A robots.txt file lets you manage crawl traffic from Google and other search engine. You can let search engines know which URLs can be accessed by your website. Website owners may block Google from crawling their site by tinkering with the code inside the robots.txt file.
Outsource this task to search engine optimization companies for small businesses. They have technical experts who can optimize the file according to your requirements, while you get the freedom to focus on operating your establishment more efficiently.
4. 404 Error
As mentioned above, when the search engine fails to crawl the pages on your website, it leads to crawl errors. 404 error is one of the most common URL errors and may happen for many reasons, from broken links and deleted pages to changing the URL of a page without redirecting the old links that pointed to that URL.
404 errors can’t be resolved since they are a response from the server. However, similar to Amazon and other e-commerce websites, WooCommerce SEO services recommend you add a custom 404 page to provide a better user experience to your customers.
5. Server Error
Server errors are crawl errors that take place when servers stop a page from loading. Depending on the type of server error, you get different error codes. Some of the most common server errors are:
- 500 – You get this code when there’s an internal server error.
- 501 – You get his error when the server fails to recognize a request method and can’t find a resource to support it.
- 502 – When a server acts as a gateway and receives an invalid response from another server, you get this error.
- 503 – A server under maintenance or repair returns this error
- 504 – You get this error when there’s a gateway timeout. For instance, if a server is acting as a gateway and doesn’t get a reply from another server for a long time, it results in this error.
While these are some of the most common errors, there’s a long list of crawl errors that you may miss out on. The easiest way to get rid of all these errors is to have a site audit conducted by a reputable white-label SEO outsourcing company. That allows you to provide a better user experience to your customers without tanking your budget.
