Crawl Erorrs Relationship to SERP Ranking

[tobylogue]

Looking at my Google Websmaster Account it always seems to highlight crawl erros despite my best attempts to rectify them.

Currently, my main site has the following crawl errors:

1 HTTP
97 in the Sitemap
228 'Not Found'
32 'Soft 404s'

Does anyone know how significant these issues are in relation to performace and ranking on Google's SERPs?

[tedster]

It really depends on WHICH urls are generating errors. If they are related to the urls that you hoped would be ranking, then it can affect your traffic. And if the pages that contain bad links are internal - occurring your own website - then it can be a sign of real trouble that you are making for yourself.

But as a general rule, other sites cannot point 404 links at your domain and make trouble for your rankings. John Mueller (johnmu) from Google has made that point several times in just the past month on the Google Webmaster Forums.

So I'd advise you to understand those crawl errors. Sometimes you can safely ignore them, and sometimes the information can tip you off to something you would do well to fix.

[tobylogue]

thanks for the advice tedster.