GWT crawl errors: How big a ranking issue?

[Jeepster]

For family reasons (child to look after) I can't keep a close eye on my SEO and SERPs. But from top 10 rankings in January for a dozen keywords I'm now not in top 80 results -- save one keyword for which I'm  ~18-20.
Not a sitewide penalty: some of my internal pages are still ranking top 3 or so.

In GWT, late March I received  warning of a rise in server errors:
17 Server Errors/575 soft 404s/17 Not Founds/Access Denied 1/Others 4
I've also got 2 very old sitemaps (from two different ex-SEO firms) & I'm guessing about 75% of the links on there no longer exist.

Q: Could all this be behind my calamitous SERPS drop? Or should I be devoting my -- limited --  time to improving my links?

[Keszi]

Hi Jeepster,

I saw this question wasn't answered yet, so here I come with one:

What I would do in your case, is to check when the rankings or the traffic dropped.

Since, like you said, you have a child to look after, it means that you might not have a ranking history... well, if you have Moz PRO, then you could go to: Campaigns -> Ranking tab -> Change the "full rankings report to PDF" into "Entire keyword ranking history to csv" export it, and then look after the Keyword, Date, Traffic and Google Ranking columns.

If you are not a PRO member or you do not have a campaign set up for this particular website, you could analyze your traffic from Google Analytics and check aprox. on which date did your organic traffic drop.

After you have this, you could check the Google Algorithm Change history of Moz.com. Compare the dates and try to figure out what update has taken you down.

Regarding 17 Server Errors/575 soft 404s/17 Not Founds/Access Denied 1/Others 4:

• try to export the data of errors and check them manually (sorry, I can't give you tools for this, the best is, to look it up manually)
• yes, these errors could lead to problems in ranking (a while ago, a quite big website of a previous employer dropped in rankings. after resolving these issues, we got back)
• cleaning up your GWT in order to be clear it will help you

I really hope it works out for you!

Cheers,

Istvan