Crawl Errors refer to issues that search engine spiders (or “bots”) encounter when trying to access and crawl pages on a website. When search engine bots are unable to crawl specific pages, it can lead to those pages not being indexed and, therefore, not appearing in search results.
Crawl errors can impact a website’s SEO performance, as they can prevent important pages from being indexed or can signify underlying technical issues that need to be addressed. Crawl errors can be categorized into two main types:
DNS Errors, Server Errors (5xx status codes), and Robots.txt Fetch Errors.
404 Not Found, Access Denied (403 status code), Soft 404 Errors, Blocked by robots.txt, Blocked by NoIndex, and Timeout or Connection Errors.
Addressing crawl errors is crucial for SEO. By regularly monitoring these errors using tools like Google Search Console, website owners can fix issues that may be preventing their pages from being indexed and ranked by search engines.