Nowadays we spend a lot of time in Google Webmaster Tools ensuring that our websites are running as smoothly as possible. So it’s great to hear about Google’s most recent change to their Crawl Error Tool.

Until recently Google has reported all crawl errors as URL errors but this isn’t always the case; sometimes there are errors across a full domain that affect all URLs. Google will now label these separately as Site Errors

What’s the difference between Site Errors and URL Errors?

Site errors are not specific to URLs, they are errors that affect your whole website. Errors such as web server connectivity errors, problems accessing the robots.txt file, DNS resolution errors etc… However errors that are specific individual pages/URLs on your website are now flagged as URL Errors.

Site Errors

In the past Google reported site errors as URL errors. However this didn’t make sense because they aren’t specific to individual URLs but are errors with the full website and sometimes these errors would stop the Googlebot from even accessing the website.

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Obviously if your website has no errors then you will see this in the tool.

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URL Errors

If you have no site errors then you can have a look through any possible URL errors that you may have, safe in the knowledge that these aren’t site errors and each error can be fixed individually.

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There have also been some improvements to the URL Errors Tool. You can now instantly filter and sort the errors by any column which helps us to fix these errors in any order we want to such as by error type which is extremely useful.

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With this tool we can also dive deeper into each individual error giving us more information about the error. Such as where the error is occurring (whether it is links from a page of the sitemap) and an actual link to the page so we can see the error in action.

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We can also track the errors we have fixed by marking them as fixed. Google will then remove these errors from the tool. However if the error is in fact not fixed then Google will flag this error again next time it indexes the page.