Google Search Console is a free tool that helps you monitor your website’s performance to identify and fix any potential problems that prevent it from appearing in Google’s search results as expected.
We’ve put together a list of some of the most common Google Search Console error reports, as well as how to determine what might be causing the error, and, in most cases, how to fix it.
Contents:
1. Pages with Errors that have not been indexed
1.1. Pages are Blocked by robots.txt
1.2. Page is marked "No Index"
1.3. Page has a Crawl Issue
2. 404 Errors
2.1. Submitted URL seems to be a soft 404
2.3. Submitted URL Not Found (404)
3. Errors not including indexing errors
3.1. Crawled - Currently Not Indexed
3.2. Crawl Anomaly
3.3. Duplicate without User - Selected Canonical
3.4. Duplicate, Submitted URL Not selected as Canonical
3.5. Discovered - Currently Not Indexed
Pages with Errors have not been indexed:
Pages that are not being indexed by Google will not appear in organic results, which means this page will not show up on Google at all. There are a few reasons that your pages are not being indexed by Google, these are listed below:
1) Pages are Blocked by robots.txt
Cause: You submitted this page to be indexed by Google but it is being blocked by the robots.txt file. This is a file that helps Google Crawlers find which URLS they can access and cannot access. So, if one of your pages are getting blocked by this, there is a huge chance that this is supposed to happen and that this error can be ignored.
This file can be found by adding /robots.txt at the end of your live domain name URL.
2) Page is marked "No Index"
Cause: The reason that this error will occur is if the page you are indexing has a "noindex" meta tag or a HTTP header. This is very similar to the above error - you are sending Google two conflicting instructions on what to do with that page.
Fixing this error: If you would like this page to be indexed, remove the "noindex" meta tag from the page and reindex the page via Google Search Console.
3) Page has a Crawl Issue
Cause: Google has encountered an unspecified crawling error. Unfortunately, there are many different issues that could be the cause but Google does not provide any more information on this.
Fixing this error: Google recommends you use their URL Inspection Tool to debug your page and find the root cause of this error.
404 Errors:
A 404 error means that the GoogleBot/crawlers cannot find a page. Typically, it is either no longer in a place that is accessible to the bot or the page is now blank. Here are a few examples of 404 errors that can occur and how you can fix them:
1) Submitted URL seems to be a soft 404
Cause: So this happens when you submit a page for indexing at some point, but the server is now returning a blank or nearly blank page.
Fixing this error: If the page is no longer available and has no clear replacement, the 404 (not found) error will continue to show. If the page has been moved or has a clear replacement, setting up 301 redirects will fix this.
2) Submitted URL Not Found (404)
Cause: A URL included in your sitemap no longer exists. Sometimes, a page needs to be removed (creating a 404) and that is completely acceptable. For example, you might remove a discontinued product that has no equivalent replacement.
Fixing the error: Only some 404s will need to be fixed. If a URL should exist but has moved, simply add in a 301 redirect; you can do the same if a discontinued product has a good replacement version (such as the newer model). If the URL is unknown or you want to permanently delete the content, you can ignore the 404 error. Eventually, Google will stop looking for these pages.
Errors not including indexing errors:
Sometimes, in the Google coverage report, you may see pages that have been excluded from Google's Index. Not all of these should be considered as errors or issues, but some could cause for concern. Below is a list of typical errors that can occur:
General:
You will ideally want the secure version of the website to be indexed which is https://www but it doesn't make a massive difference since a lot of the other URLs (such as http://, http://www. , https://) will redirect to the correct URL. Google will not index both versions of the domain name, so it will only either index the "www" version or the "non www" version.
1) Crawled - Currently Not Indexed:
Cause: The GoogleBot has crawled your page and has decided not to index it. So, what you can do is use a site: search in Google to confirm whether or not these pages listed are actually indexed. If they aren't and they should be, confirm that they are in your site map, not disallowed in robots.txt, are not canonicalized to another page, are not a duplicate of another page, and they have proper meta robots tags on them (if they are a Rocketspark website, then they will have this).
Fixing this error: If all of this checks out, there are two options for you. You can use the URL inspection tool or wait patiently for Google to recrawl your website and hope it sees and indexes those pages next time.
2) Crawl Anomaly:
Cause: This error occurs when Google was unable to gain access to the page/s.
Fixing this error: The best way to fix this is to use the URL inspection tool to see if there are any obvious errors and based on that, you should be able to find the root cause of this error.
3) Duplicate without User - Selected Canonical:
Cause: This error occurs when the Google Crawler/Bot finds more than one version of the page but none of those pages have a specified canonical tag. Google doesn't think that this page should be the primary page, so it decided to not index it.
Fixing this error: Find all versions of the page/s and add the appropriate canonical tags. If all versions of the page aren't. needed, you may want to redirect additional variations to the primary page. If all pages are needed, consider canonicalizing the additional variations to the primary URL.
4) Duplicate, Submitted URL Not selected as Canonical
Cause: Similar to the error above, this is one of the pages in a group of duplicates in which none of the pages have a canonical tag identified. The difference between the two errors is that this one appears when you have specifically requested indexing on a URL and Google feels that a different page deserves the canonical instead.
Fixing the Error: Add appropriate canonical tags to your pages. Similar to the fix above, consider canonicalizing the URL to the primary page (if this one is not it). If this is the primary page, canonicalize the additional URLs to this page.
5) Discovered - Currently Not Indexed
Cause: Google knows the page exists but was unable to crawl it.
Fixing this error: Make sure that the Google Crawler/Bot is able to access your website and that it isn't generally overloaded. Google will have rescheduled the crawl at a different time.