Crawl Errors.

Crawl errors are HTTP status codes returned to search engine bots (Googlebot, Bingbot) indicating that a page could not be accessed as expected. Common types include 404 Not Found (the URL no longer exists), 5xx Server Errors (the server failed to respond or returned an error), soft 404s (pages that return a 200 status but display an error or empty message), and redirect errors (redirect chains or redirect loops that prevent crawl completion).

Prioritising Crawl Errors

Not all crawl errors require immediate action. 404 errors on URLs with no backlinks, no internal links, and no historical traffic are low priority: Googlebot will eventually stop crawling them. 404 errors on URLs with backlinks should be 301-redirected to the equivalent live page to recover link equity. Server errors (500, 503) are high priority: they block crawling of all affected pages.

Soft 404s

Soft 404s occur when a page returns HTTP 200 (success) but Google determines the content is essentially an error page: empty search results, 'no results found', sparse content. Google's algorithms detect these and may exclude them from the index. Fixing soft 404s often requires either adding real content to the page or returning a proper 404/301 response.

Monitoring Crawl Errors

Google Search Console's Coverage report categorises crawl errors and their frequency. Screaming Frog and Sitebulb surface crawl errors during site audits. Server log analysis reveals which URLs Googlebot repeatedly encounters errors on, a more comprehensive view than GSC alone, which samples rather than reporting every error.