What are tracking errors?

One of the keys to achieve good positioning is to ensure that our website is crawlable by search engine spiders. Among them, of course, the Google robot. And for this purpose we have an invaluable tool: Search Console.

But let’s start at the beginning: what is a crawl error? After answering this question, we will see how to detect crawl errors in Search Console and give them a proper solution.

Table of contents

1 what is a crawl error?
2 how to detect crawl errors in Search Console?
- 2.1 Website Errors
- 2.2 URL errors
3 how to fix crawl errors?

what is a crawl error?

One of the many reports that Search Console offers is the “Crawl Report”. Here you can find detailed information about crawl errors. But what is a crawl error? It is basically a problem or difficulty that Google had while crawling URL’s of your website. So let’s see how to detect crawl errors in Search Console.

how to detect crawl errors in Search Console?

Luckily, crawl errors in Search Console are very well classified and described in the Crawl Report:

Website Errors

They consist of problems that the Google robot had in accessing some part of the website, and are classified into 3 types:

DNS: the bot was unable to connect to the DNS server.
Server connectivity: the bot continues without accessing the URL. connection.
Robots.txt file: the robots.txt file cannot be accessed or read correctly.

URL errors

Specific crawl errors for each URL that Google tried to track but could not. Thousands of such errors can occur, although some of the most important are:

Server errors
Page not found (404 error)
Access denied
URL not followed
Flash content (not viewable on some mobiles)
Faulty redirects
etc.

Now, you already know what are crawl errors and how to detect them with Search Console, so the question of how to fix crawl errors is the next step.

how to fix crawl errors?

Let’s see how to fix the most important crawl errors. Namely, DNS errors, connectivity, robots.txt file and URL access.

DNS errors

To fix DNS crawl errors, the first thing to do is to use the Explore as Google function to check that the page appears in the search engine. If it does not because it does not have a host name assigned to it, just program the server to return an HTTP status code.

Server connectivity

To fix connectivity crawl errors, the first thing to do is to optimize the web page (or the entire site):

reduce the load of dynamic content, and the weight of images and other files
replace embedded objects with Javascript code
help the Google robot by using URL parameters and configuring the robots.txt file correctly
make sure that the CMS, server firewall, DNS settings, etc. are properly configured.

If you still get crawl errors afterwards, you may want to look for a more efficient (or less overloaded) hosting to host your website.

Robots.txt

If the robots.txt file does not exist, create and configure it so that the Google robot can access and read it without problems. In case it does exist and there is nothing wrong with it, you might want to see if the firewall is blocking it for some reason.

URL errors

As we saw, URL errors are many and each one has a specific solution. Luckily, there are certain actions to fix common crawl errors. The main ones are:

update sitemaps frequently
use redirects instead of 404 pages
make sure there are no broken links
configure the DNS properly

In short, you must ensure that the Google robot can follow each of the links without problems. This way you will be able to access all the URL’s of your website.