Does Your Site Have 500 Errors?

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So today, Devin, we're going to talk about 500 error codes. You know, I'm, I'm a little old school here. I know about 301 redirects and 302s and, and 404 errors, which is a page not found, which is really bad, especially if it's a paid click. But I'm hearing about 500 error codes. And I'm wondering if you might be able to give us a little bit of, you know, what is a 500 error code and what causes it, first of all?

Yeah, it's a really good question. You know, often it's kind of funny. It's something that lies or lurks in the depths of websites and sometimes not caught. But a 500 error code is basic— it's another flag that something is wrong with your website. But usually in this case, it's a result of a server misconfiguration. Where 3X and 4X errors, those are typically looking at, you know, things that you control inside of your content management system like WordPress. A 500 server error is typically something involving, you know, your hosting provider having an issue. Though, I mean, your website development process could also misconfigure something on the server, but typically it is controlled by the hosting provider and the server providers. So something like a CDN malfunctioning or, yeah, one of your hosting providers having some issues with their site hosting, those are very common for 500 issues.

Okay. So what does a 500 error mean? What does that tell you? What triggers it?

Yeah, so it's just another code to be able to help dissect what's wrong with the site. And in this case, it's saying that pages are inaccessible. By the user. The 500 delineate— the 5 and the 500 delineates that it is server related. And then, you know, any subsequent 501, 502, like those all then will help indicate what the more specific issue at hand is.

Okay.

But generally anything in the 500s is that server related issue.

Okay, so, so as opposed to 400, like a 404 error, like you could have a broken link in the site or something like that that points to, you know, a non-existent page.

This is not found.

Yeah, yeah. So this isn't the page isn't found, it's nothing not on your site. It has more to do with either the hosting, the CDN, the way the page content is transmitted to the user. Is that correct?

Exactly. Yep.

You got it.

All right.

OK. OK. So obviously, if a user can't get to a page they want to get to, that's a problem. Does it have any other negative effects on you in terms of your relationship with the search engines, anything like that?

Yeah, absolutely. So after a given amount of time, just like, you know, similar to even 400 errors, pages will be deindexed by Google. This came up in a recent conversation from John Mueller that, you know, whom many SEOs know. They bow at his altar. You know, he is the chosen one when it comes to SEO, and everybody loves asking him weird, interesting, but insightful questions. And this came up recently in a conversation. And the bottom line is, you know, if you have 500 errors, error codes that result when people are trying to look for content on your site, it will be deindexed over time. How much time? Not clear. Great Google answer to have, right? It's whenever, whenever eventually Google decides that it's valuable to deindex it. So it could be weeks, it could be months. But typically the faster you get it resolved, the better off you're going to be.

Okay. Okay. And is there like, I would guess that a server would once in a while have a hiccup or something like that. And, you know, is there sort of a threshold where you can say, oh, you know, this is below the noise level, this is just sort of typical behavior, this is not something to worry about? Is it, you know, 1%, 5%, 10%? What would you say? Where would you think that a website owner should start to get concerned?

A couple ways to think about that. And one, I would say if it's a temporary issue, usually most of these hosting providers can resolve issues within an hour or so. Shouldn't even be a blip on your radar. You probably won't even catch it, to be frank. But if you have pages that are consistently having some type of server misconfiguration error and it lasts for a while, that's when it should be concerning, at least when it comes to Google deindexing the pages. In terms of the number of those pages having configuration errors, I would say generally if it's a large site, John Mueller actually said specifically, you know, if 1% of your pages have 500 error codes, then that is probably an area of concern, or, you know, more than that. I think for a lot of small sites, anything under 5% is a, is a good kind of litmus to have. In mind.

Okay, okay. So how can, how can I find out if my site is, uh, you know, subject to producing error codes? How can I, how can I find out whether or not I have a problem in this, in this regard?

Of course, you got to know how to resolve, or you got to know how to find the issue before you can actually resolve it, right? Exactly. Um, yeah, I think the first and probably the easiest method, if you haven't already, is install Google Search Console. In the Search Console, it, based off the indexing that Google does, it will tell you if there are noticeable or any 500 errors, which URLs they are. And frankly, it'll also probably tell you how to fix it too, depending on the code that comes back as part of the indexing process. The other way to do it is using Screaming Frog, which is a very popular crawler tool. You can use it for free for the first 500 URLs. And I think for a lot of businesses and site owners, that's probably within the threshold that's allowed. But they have all the error codes clearly marked out. So then you can look and see what URLs are producing which codes. And that's a, that's a free and easy way to be able to actually check. Okay.

Okay. Yeah. But I would, I would obviously, you know, personally, I probably would trend to lean or tend to lean a little more towards Search Console because I'm more concerned about what Google thinks of my site than, you know, some random error that pops up in a crawler. Good that, you know, Screaming Frog is a great, great product. But, you know, I'm also concerned about what Google is seeing, not just what, you know, shows up on a, you know, it's a kind of a snapshot, right? When Screaming Frog crawls a site, it's a snapshot. Google will probably report it if it's, especially if it's recurring or something like that. You would see that in the Search Console and would give you an indication of, you know, whether you should be concerned or not. Okay. Is that correct? Okay. Yep.

Yep. You got it. Great.

All right. All right. Well, that sounds good. Yeah. Anybody need help with this kind of stuff? You have any questions, suggestions for other topics? You know, we'd love to hear them. But thanks, Devin. This has been great. I really appreciate you enlightening me and our audience on this.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me. We'll see you later.

All right.

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