Crawl Errors and Adding Monitoring to your Website
Many types of problems on your website can cause issues with SEO and ranking your content.
Here are some of the issues you might encounter and how to minimise the impact.
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Full Blog Post: https://www.2waydigital.com/crawl-err...
WordPress JetPack Plugin: https://jetpack.com/pricing/
FreshPing Website Monitoring: https://www.freshworks.com/website-mo...
Video Script:
Since Crawl Errors were covered in the post below, this post is backtracking slightly:
https://www.2waydigital.com/indexing-...
Depending on how you got here and how many changes you’ve had to make to your website, content and SEO structure from following our other posts, this lesson may be redundant.
However, that’s not we’ll cover here.
It’s not just crawl errors, there’s more.
I did want to dive in a little deeper on the kinds of errors that can cause issues. It’s not just the lack of an SEO strategy or good content that can affect your SERPs.
Bad UX
Crawl Errors Cause Poor User Experience
A poor user experience will affect you just as easily as irrelevant content or a slow loading page.
If your pages aren’t loading when somebody clicks a link to your site, it will affect your ranking if it gets left unchecked. You need to know as soon as possible if and when this happens.
One of the things you can do to help protect yourself against this is to have a website downtime monitor.
Crawl Errors
When you get a crawl error, usually in GSC or Bing webmaster tools (Other tools are available) most of the time, there will be help associated with what went wrong.
It may not always be obvious what causes a crawl error but they could be but are not limited to:
Server Connectivity Errors
Robots.txt Fetch Errors
Robots txt Errors in GSC / Bing
URL Errors
Server Errors
Soft 404s
Not Found (404)
Access Denied
Not Followed
DNS Errors
Some of these errors will be detectable by GSC & Bing, the robots.txt errors for example. However, they may also be caused by external factors such as the ‘URL Errors’ and therefore, could be a less obvious cause than what is reported.
WordPress Users
As usual, for WP users, we have this covered in the form of a plugin that is VERY widely used called Jetpack. Many WordPress pre-installed configurations include it as a default plugin so you may already have it installed.
https://jetpack.com/pricing/
Jetpack will send an email alert when your website is not online. Of course, there are a range of other plugins available, if you’re using something else already, there’s no need to switch to Jetpack.
Other Website Platforms
Of course, there are other tools available for everyone else. As usual, there is a range of free and paid services out there.
To get started for free, take a look at FreshPing by Freshworks.
https://www.freshworks.com/website-mo...
There is support for multiple platforms with assistance on how to set it up. As ever, if you get stuck, feel free to ask us in the Facebook Group and we’ll do what we can to help.