Technical SEO
Crawl Error
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What is Crawl Error?
A crawl error is any problem that prevents a search engine crawler from successfully accessing and reading a URL. Common crawl errors include server errors (5xx status codes) where the server is unavailable or encounters an error, DNS errors where the domain cannot be resolved, and connection timeouts. These are distinct from 4xx errors (like 404s), which indicate missing pages rather than server-side failures.
Crawl errors are reported in Google Search Console under the Coverage report and the URL Inspection tool. Persistent server errors can cause important pages to become temporarily or permanently excluded from the index if Google cannot consistently crawl them. Monitoring and resolving crawl errors promptly is a basic technical SEO hygiene practice that ensures the index remains complete and up to date.
Why it matters for SEO
Crawl errors prevent search engines from accessing content that should be indexed, directly harming a site's search visibility. A spike in crawl errors can signal infrastructure problems — such as server instability or misconfigurations — that require immediate attention to prevent ranking losses at scale.
Example
After a server migration, Search Console's page indexing report shows a spike in "Server error (5xx)" URLs because the new host's firewall is blocking Googlebot's requests. The hosting team allowlists verified Googlebot traffic, the pages start returning 200 again, and the developer uses URL Inspection to confirm Google can fetch a sample of affected URLs.
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