What are Crawl Errors and Why Should you Care About Them?

You’ve probably felt the sting of dissatisfaction once or twice in the following scenario. Imagine that you’re looking for something online, perhaps an article, or an item to purchase – and when you click on what seems to be the link you’ve been searching for – it’s no longer there! In the SEO and development world, we call this a 404 error, a Page Not Found, and it’s incredibly annoying to both people and search engines.

If your website happens to accumulate a lot of 404 errors, Google notices this and may eventually penalize your business or organization for having a poorly designed site architecture. Sometimes 404’s can be the result of a broken link, such as a page you moved, rewrote a URL for, or, maybe, even removed from your site entirely. Perhaps your business sold out of a certain product, and it was removed from your online store. 404’s are not the only kinds of issues Search Console can find on your site, but they can be frustrating to say the least. Crawl errors happen for a variety of reasons, including certain types of infections and malware programs out there. As previously mentioned, this is poor customer service, and could result in poor user experience on your site, high bounce rates, and more detrimental effects to your site. All of these things over time will signal to search engines that your site is just not that great.

Luckily, there are many tools that can help with crawl errors, namely the Search Console. Formally known as Webmaster Tools, Google’s free tool will allow you to view the broken pages so you can address them. Crawl errors, if left unchecked for too long, can damage your site, your online reputation, and, generally, result in a poor experience for your customer.

If your website’s crawl errors are out of control and require some expert help, contact the Tampa SEO’s at Absolute Marketing Solutions today! We can manage and maintain your website and ensure that it’s operating efficiently. Contact us today.