Crawling Errors vs. Indexing Errors

Why this matters

Conflating crawling errors with indexing errors leads to wrong fixes — a 404 is a crawl error (the server rejected the request) while a 'Duplicate without canonical' is an indexing error (the server responded fine but Google chose not to index it). Diagnosing the right layer determines whether you fix your server configuration, your canonical tags, or your content quality.

Try it yourself

1. In Google Search Console, open Index → Pages and map each exclusion reason listed to either 'crawl error' (server or DNS-level failure) or 'indexing error' (Google's decision not to index a successfully fetched page) — create a two-column table.
2. Pick one URL from the 'Soft 404' bucket in your Coverage report and fetch it manually with curl -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}' https://yourpage — confirm the HTTP status is 200, then explain why Google classified it as a soft 404 despite the 200 response.
3. Find one page with a 'Redirect error' in Search Console and trace the full redirect chain using curl -IL https://yoururl — identify whether the final destination is the canonical version you intended.

Prompt your AI

Use these three in order. Each builds on the one before.

1. Basics & terminology

In one paragraph, explain the difference between a crawling error and an indexing error in Google Search Console.

2. Why it works (the mechanism)

Walk me through the distinct causes of crawling errors versus indexing errors — what happens at the server layer versus the Google decision layer for each category?

3. Advanced — application & what's next

Given a site migration where 500 URLs were moved and now show a mix of 301 chains, soft 404s, and canonical mismatches in Search Console, design the diagnostic and remediation sequence that resolves each error class in the correct order.

References

• Google Search Console Help — Fix Indexing Problems