Changes in crawl error reporting for redirects
Webmaster stage: intermediate-advanced
Prior to now, we’ve got considered occasional confusion by means of webmasters relating to how crawl blunders on redirecting pages have been proven in Webmaster Instruments. It’s time to make this somewhat clearer and more uncomplicated to diagnose! While it was that we’d report the error on the original – redirecting – URL, we will now exhibit the error on the ultimate URL – the one who in truth returns the error code.
Let us take a look at an instance:
URL A redirects to URL B, which in flip returns an error. The kind of redirect, and type of error is unimportant here.
Up to now, we would have suggested the error noticed on the end below URL A. Now, we will instead record it as URL B. This makes it so much more uncomplicated to diagnose the crawl errors as they’re shown in Webmaster Tools. The usage of instruments like cURL or your favourite online server header checker, which you could now simply verify that this error is in reality happening on URL B.
This modification can also be visible in the complete error counts for some internet sites. As an instance, in case your site is moving to a brand new domain, you can simplest see these mistakes for the new area (assuming the old domain redirects correctly), which might lead to considerable changes within the total error counts for these web sites.
Note that this modification only impacts how these crawl blunders are shown in Webmaster Instruments. Also, take into account that having crawl error for URLs that will have to be returning errors (e.g. they do not exist) does no longer negatively affect the remainder of the website’s indexing or rating (additionally as discussed on Google+).
We hope this transformation makes it slightly more straightforward to track down crawl error, and to scrub up the unintentional ones that you simply weren’t aware about! When you have any questions, be at liberty to submit right here, or drop by within the Google Webmaster Lend a hand Discussion board.
