500 error reported from Google Search Console

[Optegris]

New one for me...

I'm running a WordPress powered site with enabled All in One SEO, Wordfence, and Lightspeed plugins. I'm mentioning these as possible causes of my problem.

I had an email from Google Search Console this morning reporting that it couldn't index my site due to 500 errors, which is odd. I checked server logs and nothing in there, the site is, and was, responding, and the xml and rss sitemaps have been picked up by Google. The site only came out of maintenance mode yesterday (I was blocking all bots) and I did a general clear-up of any pages/elements that I didn't need.

Those cleared up URLs appear in the unindexable (sic) report, but then genuine pages and I have nada in Google's index. I have asked a reindex but my brain is telling me that to repeat the same thing over and over with the hope of a different outcome is the definition of insanity

Anything else I should be checking?

 

[Optegris]

I "think" I might have answered my own question. The timestamp on the crawled URLs was from before I took it out of maintenance mode. I shall be patient...

 

[ctrlbrk]

(I was blocking all bots)

That could be the problem - depending how and when you were blocking all bots, Googlebot may have been caught up in that, couldn't it?

 

[Optegris]

Yep I'm thinking that's the cause. I installed the SEO plugin a few days before I took it out of maintenance mode, and connected Google search console at that time. The timestamps on the error URLs back this up. This would explain how Google got hold of the sitemaps I guess.

I've asked for a reindex none the less.

 

[samalex]

Yep I'm thinking that's the cause. I installed the SEO plugin a few days before I took it out of maintenance mode, and connected Google search console at that time. The timestamps on the error URLs back this up. This would explain how Google got hold of the sitemaps I guess.

I've asked for a reindex none the less.

It's a Server error. Please change your hosting server. It will automatically solve.

 

[fisicx]

It's a Server error. Please change your hosting server. It will automatically solve.

Did you even read the post? Do you actually know what a 500 error is?

 

[Optegris]

It's a Server error. Please change your hosting server. It will automatically solve.

Nah it was a crawler error.

The server was a lamp stack using Nginx, MariaDB and Redis for object caching that I built from scratch.

Trust me, it wasn't the server