Page gives no server response
What it is
Asky requested the page repeatedly and never got a usable HTTP response. Typical causes are a request that timed out, a domain name that does not resolve, a refused or reset connection, an invalid security certificate, or a redirect loop. Unlike a 4xx or 5xx error, the server never said what went wrong.
Why it matters
Google treats timeouts, connection resets and DNS errors much like server errors: it slows its crawling, and indexed URLs it cannot reach are removed within days. Visitors get a browser error page or one that never finishes loading. AI crawlers that hit the same wall have nothing to read, so the page is likely to be missing from answers that rely on fetching it.
How Asky checks it
Asky requests the page with a 12-second timeout and follows redirects. A request that ends without a status (timeout, DNS or connection failure, certificate error, redirect loop) is tried again once straight away, then on later crawls at least an hour apart. After five failed attempts in a row the page is marked unreachable and reported here. A URL that keeps answering with something other than an HTML page, such as a PDF, ends up here too, since there is no page to read. A 5xx answer is reported as a server error, and a 401 or 403 counts toward the AskyBot blocked issue.
Reported as an error with high severity.
How to fix it
- Open the URL in a browser, ideally also on another network such as mobile data, and note the error: a timeout, “server not found”, “connection refused”, a certificate warning or “too many redirects”.
- Server not found: check the DNS records for the domain or subdomain with your DNS provider, and correct any mistyped host in your sitemap.
- Certificate warning: renew or reissue the certificate so it covers this exact host, including
www.if you use it. - Too many redirects: find the rules sending the URL in a circle, often an HTTPS or
www.rule set both in the CMS and at the CDN, and keep only one of them. - Timeout: find out why the page takes more than 12 seconds, such as a slow database query or an external call in the template, and add caching.
- If a firewall or bot protection drops crawler requests without answering, allow the crawlers you want, AskyBot included, in its settings.
- To leave it as it is: if the URL serves a file on purpose rather than a web page, mark the issue resolved.
Example
https://example.com/resources/annual-report takes more than 12 seconds to build:
curl -s -o /dev/null -m 12 -w "%{http_code}\n" https://example.com/resources/annual-report
# 000 (no response within 12 seconds) before the fix, 200 after