Can an SEO company fix crawl errors?

Yes. Finding and fixing crawl errors is core technical SEO work. A crawl error means Google’s crawler tried to fetch a URL on your site and did not get a usable page back, whether because the server failed, the page was missing, a redirect went wrong, or something blocked access. A page Google cannot fetch properly cannot be indexed from that fetch, so this work decides whether your content can appear in search at all. The company’s job is to find which errors matter, trace each to its cause, fix it with whoever controls that cause, and confirm with Google that the fix held.

Where the company finds them

Google Search Console is the first source. The Page indexing report lists URLs that are not indexed and the reason for each, and its Source column separates problems on your site from those on Google’s side; Google’s Page indexing report help notes that, in general, the only issues you can fix are those whose source is listed as Website. The Crawl Stats report, under Settings, groups Google’s crawl requests by response, file type, purpose, and Googlebot type, which shows patterns rather than single failures.

Search Console only shows what Google has encountered. A company will also run its own crawler across the whole site to find broken links and redirect problems before Google does, and on larger sites it can analyze server logs to see which URLs Googlebot actually requests.

What the errors mean

Google’s documentation on how HTTP status codes affect its crawlers explains what each response does, and a few details change how a company prioritizes:

1. For a 500 server error, the documentation says “Google decreases the crawl rate for the site”, and that “The decrease in crawl rate is proportionate to the number of individual URLs that are returning a server error.” A spreading server problem therefore slows crawling of the whole site, not just the failing pages.
2. A 404 for a page that genuinely no longer exists is the correct answer. The ones to fix are links on your own site and in your sitemap that point to pages that should exist.
3. A page can return a success code and still be treated as an error: if its content looks like an empty page or an error message, Search Console reports a soft 404. Internal search-results pages and empty category pages are places to check.
4. Google’s crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops by default, so long chains risk the final page never being reached, and each hop is an extra request. The documentation also notes that Google’s inspection tools do not follow redirects, which matters when a company tests a redirected URL with URL Inspection.
5. Google’s robots.txt introduction allows blocking unimportant images, scripts, or style files, but warns against it where their absence makes the page harder for Google’s crawler to understand.

How the fixes are made

Each cause has its own owner. Server errors go to your host or developers, with the affected URLs and times from Crawl Stats. Broken internal links are corrected at the link; moved pages get a single redirect to the most relevant live page; chains are collapsed so every link and redirect points straight to the final URL; loops are broken. Resources that pages need are unblocked in robots.txt, and the XML sitemap is cleaned so it lists only canonical, indexable URLs.

On very large or fast-changing sites, crawl efficiency becomes its own task. Google’s crawl budget guide is written mainly for sites with more than a million unique pages changing about weekly, or more than 10,000 changing daily, and it calls those figures rough estimates rather than exact thresholds. For such sites, the company reduces parameter and faceted-navigation URLs that consume crawling without adding value.

Confirming the fix

After a fix, the company uses Validate fix in the Page indexing report so Google rechecks the affected URLs, and it watches Crawl Stats for the response pattern to change. New errors appear whenever a site is redesigned, moved, or grows, so crawl health belongs in routine maintenance, with each check and fix recorded in the reports you receive.