Crawl Error

Definition

Crawl errors occur when Googlebot or another crawler attempts to fetch a URL and receives an error response: 404 (Not Found), 410 (Gone), 500 (Internal Server Error), 503 (Service Unavailable), or other non-200 responses. These errors appear in Google Search Console under Coverage → Excluded → Not found (404) and related categories. The two main types: (1) soft 404s — pages that return 200 OK but display "not found" content; (2) hard errors — 4xx and 5xx status codes. Crawl errors consume crawl budget without returning indexable content, and any external links pointing to a 404 URL lose their equity (the link points to nothing).

Why it matters for SEO

Every 4xx error from an internal link is a broken user journey and a lost link equity transfer. When a page moves URLs without a redirect, every internal link still pointing to the old URL sends Googlebot to a dead end. This is particularly damaging when the moved page had external backlinks — those backlinks now point to a 404 rather than passing equity to the new URL. Monitoring crawl errors weekly (via GSC) and fixing broken internal links promptly is basic technical SEO hygiene. A 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one recovers the link equity.

How DeepSEOAnalysis checks this

The audit crawls all internal links and checks the HTTP response status of every linked URL. 4xx responses on internal links are flagged as critical errors — broken internal links that need either a redirect or link update. 5xx responses are flagged as server errors. The report lists every broken internal link with the source page, broken URL, and HTTP status, making it straightforward to prioritise fixes.

Useful tools and resources

• Full technical SEO audit