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New Coverage issue detected for site 5xx

September 15, 2020 by Peter Mahoney

I’ve had the below email from Google.
Is this something you need to fix in Search console or my devs?

I have recently moved our sites to WPEngine, hopefully that hasn’t caused any problems 🙂

A server error (most like ‘500’) simply means the server isn’t working properly. Not that it’s down, but rather it’s got issues processing the site or page.

For example if PHP isn’t working, or there’s some code in the site that’s not functioning. Normally it means some kind of code on the site breaking things.

More often than not if you see it it’s going to apply to the whole site, so because the site is working I suspect it was a temporary hosting issue.

Actually strike that!

I had a look further, and it was only one page that returned the 5xx error, and it’s not actually a page! It’s your WordPress theme files directory; we don’t want that indexed anyway. Google shouldn’t be trying to scan it anyhow, so I’m marked the issue as ‘fixed’ in Search Console.

(In short, it’s not a problem they can’t load it, but I’ve asked it to be cleared from Search Console just to stop you getting any other messages about it.)

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Filed Under: Google Search Console, SEO Emails, Wordpress

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