Articles
One article per failure mode CrawlWarden watches for. Each one answers the question first, then explains what causes it, how to verify it yourself, and which check reports it.
17 articles
Clicks dropped but nothing changed on the site - what can Search Console tell me?
What Search Console can answer when clicks fall and the site looks untouched, what it structurally cannot answer, and the one thing that turns the question from a guess into a dated list.
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Google says "Crawled - currently not indexed" - how do I find out when it started?
What Google means by "Crawled - currently not indexed", why the date it started is the most useful fact about it, and the four ways to recover a date Search Console does not keep.
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A page disappeared from Google - how do I find out why?
A triage order for a page that has vanished from Google: confirm it is really gone, rule out the four technical causes, then check the two reports that say it was deliberate.
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Rich results disappeared from my pages. What changed?
Four things remove rich results and two of them start on your site. What the structured data check records (the @type set, confirmed over four runs), what it cannot see, and why this site still emits FAQPage.
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How do I take a site down for maintenance without losing search visibility?
Return 503 with Retry-After for a pause of a day or two, never 503 the robots.txt, and serve an indexable placeholder for anything longer. What Google documents.
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Cloudflare is answering Googlebot with 403 - how do I confirm it and fix it?
How to tell whether Cloudflare is returning 403 to verified Googlebot, what the 15 September 2026 AI crawler defaults changed, and the order to fix it in.
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Soft 404: what Google means by it, and how to fix one
A soft 404 is a missing page that answers 200 instead of 404. What Google does with one, how to confirm it in a single curl, and how to fix each cause.
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Google indexed my staging site - how do I get it out of the index?
Get an indexed staging site out of Google today with the Removals tool, then make the removal permanent. Why robots.txt is the wrong tool for this job.
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A page went noindex - what happened, and how do I catch it next time?
What a noindex robots meta tag does, the four ways one gets onto a page by accident, and how to be told the same day instead of the next quarter.
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What is the X-Robots-Tag header, and why can I not see it in the page source?
X-Robots-Tag is an HTTP response header that controls indexing exactly like the robots meta tag - and never appears in the HTML. How to read it, where it comes from, and how to monitor it.
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The canonical tag on a page changed - does that matter?
A canonical tag pointing at the wrong URL quietly transfers a page’s ranking to another page. The three ways canonicals drift, and how to be told when one does.
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Do redirect chains hurt SEO, and how many hops are too many?
A 301 does not lose PageRank - that stopped being true in 2016. What a redirect chain actually costs, where the real limit is, and how to be told when a page starts redirecting.
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A page dropped out of my XML sitemap - how much does that matter?
A sitemap does not make Google index anything. What a page silently leaving the sitemap usually means, why it is worth an alert anyway, and what to check first.
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Is my robots.txt blocking Googlebot?
How to read a robots.txt rule the way a crawler does, why Disallow is not noindex, and how a one-line edit takes a whole path prefix out of search.
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Is my site blocked from ChatGPT, Claude and the other AI crawlers?
Reading robots.txt no longer answers this. Cloudflare decides it at the edge, and since September 2026 its Block settings reach Googlebot too.
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My site answers Googlebot differently from a browser - is that cloaking?
When a site serves crawlers something other than what a browser gets - usually by accident, via a WAF or an edge rule. Why it is dangerous, and how to detect it.
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What happens to SEO when a TLS certificate expires?
An expired or misissued certificate makes a site unreachable to browsers and crawlers alike. What Google does about it, the chain problem that works in Chrome and fails everywhere else, and what to monitor.
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Where this fits
These articles describe problems, not the product. If you want the product: CrawlWarden watches a list of URLs you choose, confirms every change at least twice before it says anything, and emails you when one of these things happens. See every check it runs, and what a change in it means, what the plans cost and what each one watches - every check is on every plan, including the free one - or what the product deliberately does not do.