Technical SEO crawl errors and how to fix them on Indian websites
Crawl errors silently kill your SEO rankings. Most Indian websites have at least a handful of them sitting unaddressed in Google Search Console. Here is how to find and fix them.
Technical SEO is not glamorous. Nobody gets excited about fixing redirect chains or resolving server errors. But I have seen Indian websites lose 30 to 40 percent of their organic traffic because of crawl issues that went unnoticed for months. The fix often takes a few hours. The damage from ignoring it can take months to recover.
What crawl errors actually are and why they matter
When Google's crawler, Googlebot, visits your website, it follows links and indexes pages. When it encounters a problem, it logs an error. If enough of your important pages are inaccessible or confusing to Googlebot, your rankings suffer.
The most common crawl error types are 404 errors (pages that no longer exist), server errors (5xx status codes meaning your server failed to respond), redirect errors (redirect loops or chains that go too many levels deep), and soft 404s (pages that return a 200 OK status but show no useful content).
How to find crawl errors on your website
Google Search Console is the first place to check. Under the Index section, open Coverage. This report shows pages with errors, pages that are excluded from indexing, valid pages, and valid pages with warnings. Focus on the Error tab first. Download the list and you have your starting point.
For a deeper crawl, Screaming Frog SEO Spider is the tool I recommend. The free version crawls up to 500 URLs. For larger Indian e-commerce websites, the paid version at around ₹12,000 per year is worth it. Screaming Frog shows you every URL it finds, the status code, redirect chains, missing meta tags, and duplicate content at the page level.
Fixing 404 errors
When a URL that used to exist no longer does, Google records a 404. The fix depends on why the page is gone. If you deleted a product that is permanently discontinued, leave the 404 and remove any internal links pointing to it. If the page was moved to a new URL, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one.
For Indian e-commerce stores on platforms like WooCommerce or Magento, seasonal products come and go frequently, creating 404 issues after every sale season. Audit these after every major campaign. A redirect plugin in WordPress handles this cleanly.
Fixing server errors (5xx)
Server errors usually point to hosting problems. If you see intermittent 5xx errors in Search Console, check whether they correlate with traffic spikes. Many Indian websites are on shared hosting that struggles when Diwali or other campaign traffic hits. Upgrading to a better hosting plan or adding a CDN like Cloudflare resolves most of these.
If the errors are consistent rather than spike-related, the issue might be a PHP timeout, a misconfigured .htaccess file, or a plugin conflict in WordPress. Check your server error logs, or ask your hosting provider to help identify the root cause.
Fixing redirect errors and chains
A redirect chain happens when URL A redirects to URL B, which redirects to URL C. Every hop in the chain wastes crawl budget and passes slightly less link equity. Screaming Frog flags these automatically. The fix is to update the original URL to redirect directly to the final destination, bypassing the intermediate hops.
Redirect loops happen when A redirects to B and B redirects back to A. These prevent the page from loading entirely. They are usually caused by plugin conflicts or misconfigured redirect rules.
Frequently asked questions
How often should I check for crawl errors in Google Search Console?
Check once a month for most websites. For large e-commerce stores with frequently changing inventory, check weekly. Set up email alerts in Search Console so you are notified when new issues are detected.
Will fixing crawl errors immediately improve my Google rankings?
Not immediately. Google needs to recrawl the fixed pages and update its index. For a site that is crawled frequently, you might see improvements within two to four weeks. For smaller websites that Google crawls less often, it can take longer.
My website has hundreds of 404 errors. Do I need to fix all of them?
Focus on 404 errors that were previously indexed pages with backlinks or internal links pointing to them. True orphan pages that were never indexed and have no links are lower priority. Use the Search Console Coverage report and Ahrefs backlink data together to prioritise which 404s matter most.