Crawl errors are problems that prevent Google from accessing or processing your pages correctly. They appear in Google Search Console's Coverage report and represent direct barriers to indexing — pages that Googlebot cannot reach cannot be ranked, regardless of their content quality or backlink profile. Regular crawl error monitoring and resolution is one of the most impactful technical SEO maintenance activities.
Where to Find Crawl Errors in Search Console
In Google Search Console, go to Indexing → Pages. This report shows all pages in four categories: Indexed, Not indexed, Crawled but not indexed, and Discovered but not indexed. The Not indexed section lists specific reasons for each non-indexed page. Click any reason to see the specific URLs affected.
The Most Common Crawl Errors and Fixes
404 Not Found. Pages that return a 404 error when Googlebot tries to crawl them. These are often caused by deleted pages, changed URLs without redirects, or broken internal links. As we covered in our guide to fixing 404 errors, fix by setting up 301 redirects to relevant live pages, updating internal links pointing to the deleted URLs, or restoring the content if it was deleted accidentally. Use our broken link checker to find all internal links pointing to 404 pages.
Redirect Error. Pages where the redirect chain is broken, creates a loop, or chains too many hops. As we covered in our guide to redirect chains, fix by updating redirects to point directly to final destination URLs.
Server Error (5xx). Pages returning server errors indicate hosting or server-side code problems. 5xx errors typically require hosting support investigation — they indicate the server is failing to process the request rather than the page not existing.
Blocked by robots.txt. Pages that exist but are blocked from crawling by your robots.txt file. As we covered in our guide to robots.txt for SEO, check whether the blocking is intentional. If not, update your robots.txt to allow crawling of the affected URLs.
Blocked by noindex. Pages with a noindex meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header that prevents indexing. Check whether the noindex is intentional — development pages and admin pages should be noindexed, but accidentally noindexed content pages are a common problem after CMS migrations.
Crawled but not indexed. Google crawled the page but decided not to index it. This typically indicates thin content, duplicate content, or quality signals insufficient for indexing. As we covered in our guides to thin content and duplicate content, substantially improve the content quality or add a canonical pointing to a better equivalent page.
Using URL Inspection for Individual Pages
For specific pages not appearing in search results, use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console. This shows exactly how Google last crawled the page, what response code it received, whether it is indexed, and the rendered version of the page. As we covered in our guide to getting pages indexed faster, use the Request Indexing button after fixing crawl errors to prompt Google to re-crawl the corrected page.
Summary
Fix crawl errors systematically by checking Search Console's Pages report monthly, addressing 404s with redirects, fixing redirect chains, resolving server errors with hosting support, reviewing intentionality of robots.txt blocks and noindex tags, and improving quality for Crawled but not indexed pages. Use our broken link checker alongside Search Console for comprehensive crawl error detection.
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