How to Find and Fix Crawl Errors in Google Search Console

Crawl errors occur when Google’s bots attempt to visit a page on your website and are unable to access it or process it correctly. Left unaddressed, crawl errors can prevent pages from being indexed, cause ranking drops, and signal to Google that your site is poorly maintained.

Google Search Console is the primary tool for identifying these issues. This guide explains how to find crawl errors in GSC, what the most common errors mean, and how to fix them systematically.

Finding Crawl Errors in Google Search Console

Log into Google Search Console and navigate to the ‘Pages’ (or ‘Coverage’) report under the Indexing section. This report categorises your URLs into four groups: Error, Valid with warnings, Valid, and Excluded. Errors are the highest priority — these are pages Google tried to index but couldn’t.

Click on any error type to expand the details and see a list of affected URLs. For each URL, you can click through to the URL Inspection tool to get more detail on how Google last crawled that specific page, what HTTP status code it returned, and what Google currently knows about it.

The most common error types you’ll encounter are 404 (page not found), server errors (5xx), redirect errors, and pages blocked by robots.txt or a noindex tag. Each has a different cause and fix.

Fixing Common Crawl Errors

404 errors (page not found) are the most common. They occur when a page that was once live has been deleted, moved without a redirect, or is linked to with a broken URL. Fix 404s by either restoring the deleted page, implementing a 301 redirect from the old URL to the most relevant existing page, or removing internal links that point to the missing URL.

Server errors (500–599) indicate a problem on your hosting infrastructure — the server couldn’t process Google’s request. These are often temporary (perhaps caused by high load or a brief server outage) but persistent server errors require investigation. Check your hosting error logs, contact your host’s support, and ensure your server is stable under normal load.

Pages blocked by robots.txt or noindex tags but still receiving external links may show up as excluded rather than errors, but they’re worth reviewing. A common mistake is accidentally applying a noindex tag sitewide via a plugin, blocking your entire site from being indexed. Check your robots.txt file at yoursite.com/robots.txt and your CMS’s SEO settings carefully.

After Fixing: Validating the Fix

Once you’ve fixed an error, return to the Coverage report in GSC and click ‘Validate Fix’ on the relevant error group. Google will re-crawl a sample of the affected URLs to check that the issue is resolved. You’ll receive a notification in GSC and by email when validation is complete.

For individual URLs, use the URL Inspection tool and click ‘Test Live URL’ to confirm the fix is in place before requesting re-indexing. This confirms that what Google will see matches your intended fix.

Don’t expect errors to disappear from the report immediately. GSC typically takes a few days to process validation results, and the error counts update on a rolling basis. Monitor the report over the following week to confirm numbers are falling.