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Recently Google has made some changes to Webmaster tools which are explained below: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/crawl-errors-next-generation.html

One thing I could not find out is how to interpret the number of errors over time. At the end of February we've recently migrated our website and didn't implement redirect rules for some pages (quite a few actually). Here is what we're getting from the Crawl errors: enter image description here

What I don't know is if the number of errors is cumulative over time or not (i.e. if Google bots crawl your website on 2 different days and find 1 separate issue on each day, whether they will report 1 error for each day, or 1 for the 1st, and 2 for the 2nd).

Based on the Crawl stats we can see that the number of requests made by Google bots doesn't increase: enter image description here

Therefore I believe the number of errors reported is cumulative and that an error detected on 1 day is taken into account and reported on the subsequent days until the underlying problem is fixed and the page it's crawled again (or if you manually Mark as fixed the error) because if you don't make more requests to a website, there is no way you can check new pages and old pages at the same time.

Q: Am I interpreting the number of errors correctly?

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Yes, you are interpreting the numbers correctly. A crawl error wil continue to be reported unti the page is returned, a redirect is set up, or Google stops attempting to crawl the page. So as Google finds more pages with crawl errors you will see your number of crawl errors rise.

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  • we are on the same page.
    – Max
    Mar 19, 2012 at 12:39
  • If you mark a page as fixed, which clearly isn't a good option for you if you have to manually go in to fix each error, it will disappear from the error list. Do either of you know if the page will reappear in the list of errors when crawled again?
    – Dallas
    Sep 20, 2012 at 19:43
  • Subquestion from text is: "...until the underlying problem is fixed and the page it's crawled again..." It means, that it is not enough, that I fix the problem on my website (for example disallowing some URLs in robots.txt), I need to wait for next crawling of the page, as I understand correctly? Meanwhile, I will still see the big number of total "not found" pages, for example.
    – tomas.teicher
    Sep 27, 2016 at 9:45

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