# Status and access checks

> Triggers and fixes for 4xx and 5xx pages, failed fetches, firewall blocks, private addresses and robots.txt blocks.

Source: https://seofix.ai/help/checks-status-and-access · Category: Issue reference · Updated: 2026-10-08

These checks are about whether a URL could be fetched at all and what it answered. They are reported on the URL itself. Problems with the links pointing to these URLs are in [Links and redirects](https://seofix.ai/help/checks-links-and-redirects.md).

SEOFix fetches with the user agent `SEOFixBot/1.0 (+https://seofix.ai/bot)`, a 15-second timeout, and does not follow redirects automatically (each hop is its own URL).

### BROKEN_PAGE — Broken page

- **Severity**: error. **Recheckable**: yes.
- **Trigger**: a crawled URL answered with a `4xx` status (for example `404` or `410`), and the answer was not a firewall challenge.
- **Details**: `status_code`.
- **Why it matters**: linked pages that return 4xx waste crawl budget, frustrate visitors and lose any rankings and links they had.
- **How to fix**: restore the page, 301-redirect it to the closest replacement, or remove the links to it (see `BROKEN_INTERNAL_LINK` on the linking pages). Use `410` only for content that is gone for good and has no replacement.

```nginx
# nginx: send a removed page to its replacement
location = /jobs/old-category { return 301 /jobs/new-category; }
```

### SERVER_ERROR — Server error

- **Severity**: error. **Recheckable**: yes.
- **Trigger**: a crawled URL answered with a `5xx` status, and the answer was not a firewall challenge.
- **Details**: `status_code`.
- **Why it matters**: search engines drop pages that keep returning 5xx, and slow down crawling of the whole site.
- **How to fix**: find the server-side error in your application logs for that URL and fix it. If it only happens under load, the crawl may have hit a capacity limit; SEOFix crawls at a polite rate, so search engines can hit it too. A recheck confirms the page answers again.

### FETCH_FAILED — Page could not be fetched

- **Severity**: error. **Recheckable**: yes.
- **Trigger**: the request failed before any HTTP response: DNS failure, connection refused or reset, TLS error, or a timeout (the crawler's timeout is 15 seconds).
- **Details**: `error`, the error name, for example `ConnectError`, `ConnectTimeout` or `ReadTimeout`.
- **Why it matters**: a page that can't be fetched can't be crawled or indexed.
- **How to fix**: check DNS records, the TLS certificate (valid, complete chain, matching host) and that the server answers reliably within a few seconds. Timeouts on a few heavy pages usually mean the page is too slow to generate; see `SLOW_PAGE`.

### BLOCKED_BY_FIREWALL — Blocked by firewall

- **Severity**: warning. **Recheckable**: yes.
- **Trigger**: pages answered `403`, `429` or `503` with the signature of a firewall or bot challenge instead of your page: Cloudflare (a `cf-mitigated` header, or a Cloudflare challenge or block page), Sucuri, DataDome or Akamai. Reported once per top-level section (for example `/jobs`), on the section's URL. When the first 50 or more fetches in a section are all blocked, SEOFix skips the rest of that section.
- **Details**: `blocked_pages`, `provider` (`cloudflare`, `sucuri`, `datadome` or `akamai`), `sample_urls` (up to 5), `fix`.
- **Why it matters**: these pages were not checked at all, so the audit is incomplete. Search engine crawlers may be challenged by the same rule.
- **How to fix**: allowlist SEOFix in your firewall or bot protection. See [Let SEOFix through your firewall](https://seofix.ai/help/firewall-allowlisting.md); the Cloudflare steps are also at https://seofix.ai/docs/cloudflare. Then run a new audit or a recheck.

### PRIVATE_ADDRESS_SKIPPED — Private address skipped

- **Severity**: notice. **Recheckable**: yes.
- **Trigger**: the URL's host resolves to a private or internal IP address. SEOFix never fetches those.
- **Why it matters**: if a public URL resolves to a private address, visitors and search engines outside your network can't reach it either.
- **How to fix**: make public hostnames resolve to public IP addresses, and remove links to internal hosts (staging, intranet, `localhost`) from public pages.

### ROBOTS_BLOCKED — Blocked by robots.txt

- **Severity**: notice. **Recheckable**: no (needs a full audit).
- **Trigger**: SEOFix found the URL, but your `robots.txt` disallows it for SEOFixBot (the `SEOFixBot` group, or `*` when there is none). The URL was not fetched.
- **Why it matters**: search engines that follow the same rules can't crawl these URLs either. Links from disallowed pages are not counted in the link checks.
- **How to fix**: if the page should be crawled, remove or narrow the matching `Disallow` rule. Disallowing `/admin`, `/cart`, internal search or `/api` is normal; ignore the notice for those.

```text
# robots.txt: before, blocks every job page
User-agent: *
Disallow: /jobs

# after: only blocks the internal search under /jobs
User-agent: *
Disallow: /jobs/search
```

## Related

- [Issue reference](https://seofix.ai/help/issue-reference.md)
- [Links and redirects checks](https://seofix.ai/help/checks-links-and-redirects.md)
- [Verify a fix](https://seofix.ai/help/verify-fix.md)
- [Let SEOFix through your firewall](https://seofix.ai/help/firewall-allowlisting.md)
- [SEOFixBot](https://seofix.ai/help/seofixbot.md)