How do you fix crawl, index, and canonical issues?

Crawl, index, and canonical issues are some of the most common and impactful technical SEO problems that can affect your organic search performance. They can prevent search engines from finding, understanding, and ranking your pages correctly, leading to lost traffic, conversions, and revenue. In this article, you'll learn how to identify and fix these issues using various tools and best practices.

Key takeaways from this article

Repair broken links:

Fixing broken links ensures search engines can crawl your site efficiently. Regularly check for and repair any broken links or server errors that might hinder crawling.### *Use canonical tags:Implement canonical tags to guide search engines on which version of a page is preferred. This helps avoid duplicate content issues and ensures correct indexing.

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1 What are crawl, index, and canonical issues?

Crawl issues occur when search engines encounter problems accessing or crawling your website, such as broken links, server errors, robots.txt directives, or slow loading speed. Index issues happen when search engines have difficulty indexing or displaying your pages in the search results, such as duplicate content, meta tags, or sitemaps. Canonical issues arise when search engines are confused about which version of a page is the preferred one to show, such as www vs non-www, HTTP vs HTTPS, or trailing slash vs no trailing slash.

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Luke Grace

🔥 Chicago SEO Growth Marketing
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In some ways, crawl and index issues are the very most important aspect to consider among all SEO factors. To understand, replace the words "crawl and index" and think of it instead as "see and store." If Google cannot crawl your website, then the search engine cannot see your website. And then of course, your website will not be stored by search engines, which is what it means to be "indexed."

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2 How to diagnose crawl, index, and canonical issues?

The first step to fixing crawl, index, and canonical issues is to diagnose them using various tools and methods. One of the most useful tools is Google Search Console, which provides reports and alerts on your site's crawlability, indexability, and canonicalization status. You can also use other tools such as Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or Ahrefs to perform a comprehensive technical SEO audit of your site and identify any potential issues.

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3 How to fix crawl issues?

In order to fix crawl issues, it is essential to make sure that your site is simple and speedy for search engines to crawl. To do this, you should repair any broken links, redirects, or server errors that could obstruct or slow down the crawling process. Additionally, you can optimize your robots.txt file to enable or disallow crawling of certain pages or directories. Improving your site speed and performance through caching, compression, minification, and other techniques is also recommended. Lastly, you should submit and update your XML sitemap to aid search engines in discovering and crawling your pages.

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Shari Thurow

Search Director at Information Architecture Gateway, Author, Top-Rated Speaker, Taxonomist, UX Researcher
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Robots exclusion is also a reasonable method for minimizing duplicate content issues. The robots.txt file is one of the first files that web search engines look at. In that file, you can tell search engines which specific files and subdirectories not to crawl. You can even use wildcard instructions, such as not crawling duplicate PDFs. Additionally, you can use the robots meta tag. However, if you use this method, please understand that a search engine should be able to access that web page so it can see the bot instructions. Finally, don’t contradict. For example, don’t put URLs in an XML sitemap that are excluded from crawling in the robots.txt file. Make sure what you communicate to both human users and search engines is consistent.

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4 How to fix index issues?

In order to fix index issues, you must ensure that your site is relevant and unique enough for search engines to index and display. To do this, you should fix any duplicate content issues by using canonical tags, 301 redirects, or noindex tags. Additionally, optimizing your meta tags, such as title, description, and keywords, can provide accurate and compelling information about your pages. You can also use structured data markup to enhance your pages with rich snippets, such as ratings, reviews, or prices. Lastly, it is important to monitor and update your index coverage report in Google Search Console to track and resolve any indexing errors or warnings.

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5 How to fix canonical issues?

To ensure search engines can understand and rank your site properly, you must fix canonical issues. Some best practices to consider include choosing and enforcing a preferred domain name, protocol, and URL structure, then using 301 redirects to point all other versions to it. Additionally, canonical tags should be used to specify the preferred URL of a page when there are multiple versions or parameters.

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6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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How do you fix crawl, index, and canonical issues?

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1 What are crawl, index, and canonical issues?

2 How to diagnose crawl, index, and canonical issues?

3 How to fix crawl issues?

4 How to fix index issues?

5 How to fix canonical issues?

6 Here’s what else to consider

Search Engine Optimization

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