: What does Google Webmaster Tools' URL errors measure? When I look at the graphs of URL errors for a particular site, is the number in a given day the actual number of errors at that point

@Angie530

As @Simon -Hayter noted in his comment, the number of errors reported is a running aggregate/cumulative tally for the site.

It may sometimes spike/jump if the crawlers try to check the site during webserver downtime/maintenance. Likewise, if you see it trend downwards, it may have detected certain errors as self-corrected.

Possible self-correction measures include:


Crawling an updated xml sitemap and realizing some urls can be
delisted.
301 redirects having been setup/added for defunct url
aliases/retired pages.
site had blocking (usually 3rd party) javascript when initially crawled, but now loads and prevents bots from indexing.


Check out the Google Search Console Crawl Errors Report (websites) page for more info about the types of errors reported and manual steps to flag/notify Google that errors have been corrected.

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