Crawl Errors In Webmaster Tools

[optimiz1]

Hi Guys,

Searched the web in an answer to the importance of crawl errors in Webmaster tools but keep coming up with different answers.

I have been working on a clients site for the last two months and (just completed one months of link bulding), however seems I have inherited issues I wasn't aware of from the previous guy that did the site.

The site is currently at page 6 for the keyphrase 'boiler spares' with a keyword rich domain and a good onpage plan. Over the last couple of weeks he has been as high as page 4, only to be pushed back to page 8 and now settled at page 6.

The only issue I can seem to find with the site in webmaster tools is crawl errors here are the stats:-

In sitemaps : 123

Not Found : 2,079

Restricted by robots.txt  1

Unreachable: 2

I have read that ecommerce sites can often give off false negatives in terms of crawl errors from Google, however, these not found crawl errors are being linked from pages within the site.

How have others solved the issue of crawl errors on ecommerce sites? could this be the reason for the bouncing round in the rankings or is it just a competitive niche and I need to be patient?

Kind Regards

Neil

[kdaly100]

Not all errors are bad but for instance if you are getting 404 errors and the actual pages do not exist anymore then you should do 301 redirects on your .htacess to point Google to the right page.  Doing this will sort out a lot of the errors.  But if you are getting 404s and the pages are there then that is a bigger problem

Restricted by robots is not an error as this is telling you that you don't want somewhere crawled.  Check the file to see if it is correct in what it is restricting.

How often are you pushing your sitemap out to Google.  If you are as active with pages as your posts suggest I would think about submitting a new one or automating its creation.

If you are actively working the content on the sties there can often be this level of SERPS  bouncing.but if you continue with the content I wouldn't worry too much about the errors for the moment and do the housekeeping above.  There are very few completely spotless sites out there and the Google Webmaser  tools and even the SEOMOZ tools here will always give you some level of errors.

hope this helps

Kieran

[optimiz1]

Hi Kieran,

Thank you so much for your answer. The issue is I don't have access to the site admin and can only suggest changes.

Ill suggest what you have put above, and push ahead with the link building and see what happens. Told the client its a competitive niche especially this time of year, my boiler always seems to pack in before winter, does seem to have a settled around page 6, so you may be right.

Just didn't want to rule out if this was a possible penalization from Google.

Kind Regards

Neil

[kdaly100]

That's a bit of a pain.

If anything tell them to set up a custom informative 404 error page that will at least direct them somewhere else and not bail from the site.