Imagine visiting a local bakery in Birkenhead, opening the front door, and stepping straight into an empty brick wall with a sign that says: “404 Not Found”. You would feel baffled, turn around, and take your business elsewhere. That is precisely what happens when search engine crawlers and real human visitors run into broken links on your website.
As outlined in our core guide, Why Your Wirral Website Isn’t Ranking and How to Fix It, website technical health serves as the foundation for all successful search marketing. Resolving crawl issues works hand-in-hand with Carrying Out a Pain-Free SEO Health Check on Your Wirral Website and Connecting Your Web Pages So Visitors and Search Engines Find Everything, ensuring search algorithms can index your entire site without hitting dead ends.
What Are Crawl Errors and Why Do They Matter?
Search engines deploy automated bots—known as web crawlers or spiders—to discover, evaluate, and index content. These spiders follow links from page to page. When a spider encounters a broken link, a server timeout, or a misconfigured redirect, it cannot complete its evaluation.
When you have dozens of crawl errors, you waste your website’s crawl budget—the time and resources search engines allocate to your domain during a crawl. Worse yet, broken internal links break the flow of PageRank (link equity), leaving your key service pages underpowered in search results.
Identifying Broken Links (404 Not Found Errors)
To fix website crawl errors, you first need to locate them. Rather than manually clicking every single link across your website, use automated audit tools:
- Google Search Console: Go to the “Pages” report. Look under “Why pages aren’t indexed” and click on “Not found (404)”. Google provides a comprehensive list of every broken URL its spiders encountered.
- Desktop Crawlers: Free tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free for up to 500 URLs) crawl your site just like Google, giving you a complete report of internal and external broken links.
Fixing Broken Pages with Proper 301 Redirects
Once you identify your 404 errors, do not leave them hanging. If the broken URL was an old service page you replaced, set up a clean 301 permanent redirect pointing from the old URL to the new, relevant page. This transfers historical ranking power and preserves bookmarks from past visitors.
However, if the broken link is simply a typo in your main navigation or body copy (for example, typing about-uss instead of about-us), update the internal link directly in your content editor rather than relying on redirects. Clean internal links ensure visitors and search bots reach pages as fast as possible without unnecessary redirection delays.
Resolving Server Errors (5xx Issues)
Server errors (such as 500 Internal Server Error or 503 Service Unavailable) are more serious than standard 404s. They signal that search engine crawlers attempted to visit your site, but your web hosting server failed to respond in time.
Frequent 5xx errors often indicate that your web hosting is struggling with traffic spikes or that an unoptimized script is crashing behind the scenes. If you notice repeated server errors in Search Console, speak with your hosting provider immediately to review server error logs and resource limits.
Keeping Your XML Sitemap Clean and Current
Finally, check your XML sitemap. Your sitemap should serve as an accurate, curated list of the pages you actively want Google to index. It should never contain 404 URLs, redirected links, or pages blocked by robots.txt. Ensuring your sitemap is clean and up to date provides search engines with a clear roadmap to index your content quickly and efficiently.