Crawl Errors & SEO Ranking: 7 Easy Tips To Fix the Basics

A website’s crawlability determines its search engine optimization (SEO) ranking, influencing visibility and accessibility. Web page indexing and search engine visibility are negatively affected by crawl errors.

Common errors such as 404 (page not found), 500 (server errors), or redirect loops can impede crawlers' ability to explore and index website content. This guide shows how fixing these issues improves website health and visibility. It covers the following topics:

• Regular website monitoring
• Fixing 404 errors
• Optimizing robots.txt file
• Improving loading speed
• Updating sitemap 
• Mobile-friendliness
• Addressing server errors

Businesses can optimize their websites for improved crawlability, indexing, and visibility by working with a technical SEO agency. Let’s go!

Watch this video to learn how Digital Authority Partners tackles Technical SEO!

1. Perform Regular Site Monitoring

Regular site audits identify and rectify crawl errors. Regularly monitoring the site allows timely detection of issues such as broken links, server errors, or pages blocked from indexing.

Addressing these crawl errors helps maintain website health, ensures effective indexing by search engines, and sustains or improves SEO rankings by creating a smoother user experience. It takes these tools to monitor and identify crawl errors:

• Google Search Console is a free tool that provides detailed reports on crawl errors encountered by Google's search engine crawlers. It offers insights into URL errors, server errors, and indexing issues, allowing website owners to promptly rectify these errors.
• Screaming Frog is a website crawler tool that helps identify crawl errors by analyzing website structure, broken links, and redirects. It provides comprehensive reports on errors and issues hindering proper crawling and indexing.
• SEO tools offer site audit features for identifying crawl errors, broken links, and website health issues. It provides actionable insights to address these errors and improve overall site performance.
• Customized scripts and logs allow for in-depth analysis of crawl errors and server responses. These provide detailed insights into how search engine crawlers interact with a website and help identify specific issues that other tools might not detect.

These tools and methods help website owners and SEO professionals monitor and address crawl errors, ensuring a healthy and well-indexed website.

2. Fix 404 Errors

Fixing 404 errors is crucial for addressing crawl errors and enhancing SEO rankings. These errors indicate a page is not found, creating a negative user experience, and losing valuable content indexing. 

By resolving 404 errors through redirects or content restoration, websites maintain a seamless user journey and preserve link equity. Fixing errors also signals to search engines that the website is well-maintained, positively impacting SEO rankings. These technical SEO tactics can help identify and fix 404 errors:

• Conduct periodic site audits using tools, such as Google Search Console, to identify 404 errors on the website.
• Utilize Google Search Console's Crawl Errors report to identify specific URLs that return 404 errors and promptly address them.
• Redirect broken links to relevant and updated pages using 301 redirects. Redirecting broken URLs to similar or related content helps maintain the user experience and preserve link equity.
• Create custom 404 error pages that provide helpful information, guide users to your website's main sections, or offer alternative navigation options.
• Monitor internal links to ensure they point to active and relevant pages. Fix any broken internal links to prevent 404 errors.
• Use backlink analysis tools to monitor external links pointing to the website. Contact webmasters to update or correct broken external links that lead to 404 errors on the site.

Implementing these strategies helps identify, address, and fix 404 errors, making sure of a smoother user experience and maintaining a healthy and well-indexed website.

3. Optimize Robots.txt File

The Robots.txt file guides search engine crawlers on which parts of a website to crawl and index. It controls crawler access to specific pages or directories by listing allowed or disallowed areas, impacting how search engines navigate and index a site's content.

Properly configuring the Robots.txt file ensures that search engine crawlers focus on essential pages while preventing them from accessing sensitive or irrelevant content. These positively affect a website's visibility and indexing in search results. 

Note this technical SEO agency's best practices for setting up and optimizing a Robots.txt file:

• Create and edit the Robots.txt file using a plain text editor to avoid formatting issues that might occur with word processors or rich text editors.
• Use directives, such as "User-agent," to specify search engine crawlers and "Disallow" to indicate which parts of the site should not be crawled. Use "*" to apply rules to all crawlers or specify individual bots.
• Use precise disallow rules to block access to sensitive or irrelevant content while allowing crawlers to access important pages. Avoid blocking essential sections of the site inadvertently.
• Use Google Search Console's Robots.txt testing tool to verify that the directives are correctly set up and are not preventing access to critical content.
• Use comments within the Robots.txt file to describe rules and provide context for future reference or for others managing the site.

Lastly, continuously review and update the robots.txt file as the site evolves. Monitor crawl errors and search engine indexing to ensure the file's directives align with the site's structure and content.

4. Improve Website Loading Speed

Website loading speed influences the crawl rate of search engine bots. Faster-loading websites are often crawled more frequently as search engines prioritize sites that provide a better user experience. 

A quick-loading site allows search engine crawlers to efficiently navigate and index pages, leading to improved crawl rates, better indexing, and higher rankings in search engine results pages. Enhance website load time with these techniques:

• Compress and optimize images to reduce their file size without compromising quality. Use image formats suitable for the web and consider lazy loading techniques to load images only when they come into view.
• Leverage browser caching by setting appropriate cache-control headers. This allows browsers to store specific web page resources locally, reducing the need to re-download content on subsequent visits.
• Reduce the number of HTTP requests by combining multiple CSS or JavaScript files into a single file and minimizing unnecessary plugins or scripts that increase page load time.
• Utilize CDNs to distribute website content across multiple servers worldwide. CDNs deliver content from servers closest to users, reducing latency and improving load time.
• Enable Gzip or Brotli compression to compress web page files (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) before sending them to users' browsers, reducing file sizes and improving load speed.
• Clean up and optimize website code by removing unnecessary characters, spaces, or comments. Optimize JavaScript and CSS by removing unused code and minimizing code bloat for faster rendering.

Implementing these tips can significantly improve website load time, resulting in a smoother user experience, better technical SEO performance, and higher visitor retention.

5. Regularly Update the Sitemap

A sitemap is a roadmap for search engine crawlers, guiding them to navigate and efficiently index a website's content. It provides a hierarchical structure of a site's pages, URLs, and relationships, helping crawlers discover and understand its organization. 

By regularly updating the sitemap, website owners ensure that search engines know about new content, changes, or updates, facilitating faster and more comprehensive indexing of the site's latest information. Here are some best practices for sitemap creation and maintenance:

• Ensure that the sitemap includes all essential pages, especially those not readily discoverable through standard site navigation, such as dynamically generated pages, product pages, or pages with fewer internal links.
• Adhere to XML sitemap protocols outlined by search engines such as Google. Use XML format, follow syntax guidelines, and include necessary tags such as <url>, <lastmod>, <changefreq>, and <priority>.
• Use the <priority> tag to indicate the relative importance of individual URLs within the sitemap. Assign priority to crucial pages, guiding search engines on which pages to crawl and index first.
• Include the last modified date (<lastmod>) for each URL to indicate when the content was last updated. Regularly update timestamps to inform search engines about recent changes, aiding in efficient crawling.
• Organize the sitemap for user and search engine accessibility. Create a user-friendly HTML sitemap for website visitors and an XML sitemap for search engines, ensuring both are easily accessible and navigable.

Once created or updated, submit the sitemap to search engines through Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools to prompt search engine crawlers to efficiently index the updated content.

6. Ensure Mobile-Friendliness

Due to growing mobile device usage, a mobile-friendly website is crucial for effective crawling and indexing by search engines. Search engines prioritize mobile-friendly sites, considering mobile usability as a ranking factor. 

Ensuring mobile friendliness enhances accessibility and the user experience, prompting search engine crawlers to efficiently navigate, index, and rank web pages. These eventually boost site visibility in mobile search results. Create a mobile-responsive website using these technical SEO agency strategies: 

• Implement responsive web design techniques to create a flexible layout that adapts seamlessly to various screen sizes and devices, ensuring content displays correctly across mobile, tablet, and desktop devices.
• Set the viewport meta tag correctly to make sure that the web page scales properly and adjusts to the screen size of the user's device, preventing zooming and horizontal scrolling.
• Choose readable fonts and appropriate font sizes that are easily legible on smaller screens. Avoid tiny fonts or excessive text, ensuring content remains clear and easily digestible on mobile devices.
• Optimize images and multimedia elements to reduce file sizes without compromising quality. Use formats suitable for mobile devices and consider lazy loading techniques to improve load time.
• Use touch-friendly elements for navigation, buttons, and links, ensuring that they are easily tappable and spaced adequately to prevent accidental clicks on smaller screens.
• Test the website's responsiveness across various devices, screen sizes, and orientations using tools, such as Google's Mobile-Friendly Test, or physically checking on different devices to ensure consistent performance and usability.

With these tips, businesses are able to create a mobile-responsive website, providing an optimal user experience across a wide range of mobile devices and improving search engine rankings for mobile searches.

7. Address Server Errors

Addressing server errors helps eliminate crawl errors and enhance SEO rankings. Server errors, such as 5xx status codes, hinder search engine crawlers from accessing web pages, resulting in incomplete indexing. 

Resolving these server errors ensures smooth accessibility for crawlers, enables proper indexing of web content, and positively impacts SEO rankings by improving a website's crawlability and visibility. Remove server errors using these techniques.

• Monitor server logs for error reports to identify instances of 5xx errors. Logs provide insights into specific technical SEO issues causing server errors, aiding diagnosis and resolution.
• Use website monitoring tools such as Pingdom, UptimeRobot, or New Relic to monitor server uptime and performance continuously. These tools provide real-time alerts when server errors occur.
• Verify the hosting provider's status page or announcements for any reported server outages or maintenance that might lead to 5xx errors.
• Review error details displayed, such as error codes (e.g., 500, 502, 503) and error messages, to pinpoint the root cause.
• Review server configurations such as memory limits, timeouts, or server load to make sure that they are appropriately configured and optimized to handle website traffic without causing errors.
• Set up error handling mechanisms and monitoring systems to automatically detect and alert when 5xx errors occur, allowing for quick resolution and minimizing downtime.

Regularly monitoring server health, promptly addressing 5xx errors, and implementing preventive measures contribute to maintaining a stable and error-free server environment.

Summing Up

Addressing crawl errors involves regularly auditing and updating the sitemap, as well as monitoring and rectifying 404 errors. Marketers also optimize Robots.txt files, ensure mobile responsiveness, fix server errors, improve website loading speed, and leverage analytics. 

Maintaining a crawl-error-free website improves SEO rankings, facilitates smoother search engine indexing, enhances the user experience, and signals credibility and commitment. These lead to higher visibility and better rankings in search results.

Learn more about how crawl errors affect your website's ranking and visibility. Contact Digital Authority Partners (DAP), the best technical SEO agency, for the latest in SEO, digital marketing, and beyond.