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Error Pages in SERPs

Pages which have had impressions in Google Organic SERPs, but which return an error status code (e.g. 400, 404, 410, 500, or 501).

Priority: Critical

Impact: Negative

What issues it may cause

These pages are very likely to be removed from the search engine's indexes and lose any existing traffic.

If a user enters the site on a broken page from a search engine's results page then it's likely to result in a poor user experience and a bounce back to the search results.

How do you fix it

The pages should be checked in Search Console to confirm they are still indexed and generating search impressions.

If the pages were removed deliberately then they will be removed from the search engine's indexes automatically in time.

If there is an appropriate alternative working page then the URL could be 301 redirected to the alternative URL.

If a 404 status is being used, consider switching to a 410 status which is a stronger indication that the page has been permanently removed and it should be removed from the index more quickly.

What is the positive impact

If the URL is redirected then there is a chance that the rankings will be inherited by the redirect target, and the search traffic can be maintained.

Crawl budget can be saved and may be used more important pages may be crawled more often, or saved on server costs.

How to fetch the data for this report template

You will need to run a crawl for report template to generate report. When report has been generated and you have crawl id you can fetch data for the report using the following query:

query GetReportStatForCrawl(
$crawlId: ObjectID!
$reportTemplateCode: String!
$after: String
) {
getReportStat(
input: {crawlId: $crawlId, reportTemplateCode: $reportTemplateCode}
) {
crawlUrls(after: $after, reportType: Basic) {
nodes {
pageTitle
url
foundAtUrl
deeprank
level
searchConsoleTotalClicks
searchConsoleTotalImpressions
httpStatusCode
indexable
duplicatePage
foundInGoogleAnalytics
foundInGoogleSearchConsole
foundInBacklinks
foundInList
foundInLogSummary
foundInWebCrawl
foundInSitemap
}
totalCount
pageInfo {
endCursor
hasNextPage
}
}
}
}

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