Last reviewed: February 2026

Crawl Errors Keeping Law Firm Pages Out of Google

You published a new practice area page six weeks ago. Good content, right keywords, solid internal links. It does not appear in Google Search Console’s index. No impressions. No ranking. The page exists on your website but not in Google’s search results — and the gap between those two realities is costing you leads every day it persists.

Before blaming content quality or domain authority, check whether Google can actually reach the page. Crawl errors are the invisible barrier between your content and your rankings, and on law firm websites, they are far more common than most firms realize. A page that returns a soft 404, gets blocked by a misconfigured robots.txt, or carries a noindex tag from a plugin conflict might as well have never been published.

The Errors That Show Up Most on Law Firm Sites

Law firm websites tend to cluster around a few CMS platforms, and each one produces its own characteristic error patterns.

WordPress dominates the legal website space, and WordPress generates crawl problems in predictable ways. Poorly configured SEO plugins, especially when multiple plugins conflict, can inject noindex tags on pages that should be indexed. As of late 2025, Google updated its documentation to clarify that when Googlebot encounters a noindex directive in the initial HTML of a page, it may skip rendering entirely, meaning JavaScript-based removal of noindex tags is unreliable. If a plugin or theme template adds noindex during page generation, that page is effectively invisible regardless of how good the content is.

Tag and category archive pages in WordPress automatically generate URLs. These pages are often thin, duplicate content from blog posts, and if included in the sitemap, they consume crawl budget without adding value. The result: Google crawls dozens of empty archive pages while your actual practice area pages wait in the queue.

Sites built on Clio-integrated platforms or custom CMS solutions designed for the legal industry have their own issues. Practice area page builders that generate URLs dynamically sometimes produce soft 404 errors — pages that look fine to you but silently fail Google’s quality check. Technically, these pages return a 200 status code (telling Google the page loaded successfully) but display little or no meaningful content. Google recognizes these as soft 404s, logs them as errors in Search Console, and does not index the pages. The firm sees a live page on their website and assumes it is ranking. It is not.

Redirect chains are another frequent problem, particularly on sites that have undergone redesigns or URL structure changes. A page that redirects to another page that redirects to a third page creates a chain that Googlebot may abandon before reaching the final destination. Google’s crawlers generally follow up to five redirects but can slow or stop before that point on sites with extensive redirect chains. Each hop costs time and eats into your crawl budget (the number of pages Google allocates time to crawl on your site in a given period). For smaller law firm sites, crawl budget is rarely a concern. For sites with hundreds of pages, redirect chains and low-value URLs can mean Google spends its crawl allocation on pages that don’t matter while your new content waits.

Robots.txt and Sitemap Configuration Errors

This is where things get dangerous. A misconfigured robots.txt on a law firm site can block entire sections of content from ever being discovered.

The most damaging mistake is a blanket disallow directive left over from a staging or development environment. During site builds, developers routinely add “Disallow: /” to robots.txt to prevent Google from indexing an unfinished site. If that directive is not removed when the site goes live, or if it is inadvertently restored during an update, every page on the site becomes invisible to Google. This is not hypothetical. It happens, and firms sometimes run for weeks or months before anyone checks.

Less dramatic but equally damaging are specific directory blocks that unintentionally cover important content. A rule like “Disallow: /attorneys/” intended to block a legacy directory page can also block the firm’s current attorney bio pages if they share the same URL path. Biographies are important for E-E-A-T signals, and blocking them removes one of Google’s ways to associate content with credentialed authors. Structured data on these bio pages — covered in detail in our schema markup post — amplifies that association, but only if the pages are crawlable in the first place.

Your XML sitemap should be the map Google uses to find every important page on your site. For a law firm with practice area pages, location pages, attorney bios, and a blog, the sitemap structure matters. A single monolithic sitemap that lists 500 URLs including tag archives, author archives, media attachment pages, and actual content pages forces Google to sort the valuable from the valueless. A better approach is segmented sitemaps: one for practice area pages, one for blog posts, one for attorney bios, one for location pages. This segmentation also makes it easier to monitor indexation by section in Google Search Console.

Common sitemap errors on law firm sites include listing pages that return 404 or redirect, listing pages blocked by robots.txt (creating a contradiction Google has to resolve), and failing to update the sitemap when pages are added or removed. If your sitemap and your actual site structure disagree, Google trusts neither.

Duplicate Content From Bios and Location Variants

Attorney bio pages create a specific duplicate content risk when attorneys are listed on partner directories, legal association sites, or multi-firm platforms. If the same bio text appears on your site and on two external directories, Google has three versions of the same content and must choose which to index. If Google chooses the external version, your site loses that page’s equity.

The fix is straightforward: your site should host the most comprehensive and unique version of each attorney’s bio. External directories should have abbreviated versions or differently structured content. Canonical tags on your own bio pages pointing to themselves confirm which version you consider authoritative.

Location Page Duplicates

Location page variants present a different duplicate risk. A firm with offices in three cities might create three location pages with identical content except for the city name. Google recognizes this pattern and may classify the pages as duplicates, indexing only one or classifying the others as duplicates not selected for the index. Each location page needs genuinely unique content tied to that specific location: local court information, jurisdiction-specific details, local team members, and local results or involvement. Swapping the city name while keeping the rest of the content identical is a pattern Google specifically penalizes, as it matches the definition of doorway pages.

Using Search Console to Find What You Are Missing

Google Search Console’s Page Indexing report is the single most important diagnostic tool for understanding why pages are not appearing in search results. It categorizes every known URL on your site into indexed, not indexed, and a set of specific reasons for non-indexation.

The two status labels that cause the most confusion are “Crawled, currently not indexed” and “Discovered, currently not indexed.” They sound similar but mean different things.

“Discovered, currently not indexed” means Google knows the URL exists (it found it through a sitemap or link) but has not crawled it yet. This can indicate a crawl budget issue, where Google has decided the URL is low priority relative to other pages on your site. It can also simply mean the page is new and Google has not gotten to it yet. For most sites, Google’s own documentation notes that new pages take several days minimum to be crawled, and same-day indexing is not the norm except for time-sensitive content.

“Crawled, currently not indexed” is more concerning. Google visited the page, evaluated it, and decided not to include it in the index. This can mean the content is too thin, too similar to another page on the site, or that Google does not consider it valuable enough to index. It can also indicate a quality issue. The fix for this status is not to resubmit the URL. It is to improve the page: add depth, add unique value, differentiate it from similar pages, and ensure it has internal links pointing to it from other indexed pages.

Third-party crawl tools like Screaming Frog and Sitebulb can identify technical problems that Search Console does not surface as clearly, including redirect chains, orphan pages (pages with no internal links pointing to them), canonical tag conflicts, and pages with conflicting directives. These tools crawl your site the way Googlebot does and produce reports that map the entire link structure and error landscape. Running a full crawl monthly is reasonable for most law firm sites. Sites undergoing active content development should crawl weekly.

The Timeline for Recovery

Fixing crawl errors is not instant SEO improvement. Google needs to recrawl the fixed pages, reevaluate them, and decide whether to index them. This process has its own timeline.

For pages that were blocked by robots.txt or noindex and have now been unblocked, Google typically recrawls within days to a couple of weeks, assuming the pages are linked from the sitemap or from other indexed pages. Requesting indexing through Search Console’s URL Inspection tool can accelerate this for individual pages.

For pages that were “Crawled, currently not indexed” and have been improved with additional content, the timeline is longer because Google needs to reassess quality. Industry experience suggests two to six weeks before improved pages move from “not indexed” to “indexed,” and ranking improvements may take additional weeks beyond that.

Not every crawl error warrants the same urgency. A 404 error on a page that never had traffic or backlinks is low priority. A noindex tag on your highest-value practice area page is an emergency — and here is why the word “emergency” is not hyperbole. If that practice area page generates ten leads per month and a noindex tag makes it invisible for three months before someone notices, that is 30 lost leads. At even $3,000 average case value, the crawl error cost the firm $90,000 in potential revenue. The error took two minutes to introduce and three months to catch. Severity should drive response speed, and the simple framework is: if the error affects a page that generates or should generate leads, fix it immediately. Everything else can be batched into a regular maintenance cycle.

What this work costs in time and money: a first-time full crawl audit using Screaming Frog takes two to three hours for a typical law firm site (under 500 pages). The fixes themselves vary — simple noindex removal or robots.txt correction takes minutes; redirect chain cleanup for a site that has undergone multiple redesigns can take three to five days. For firms without Screaming Frog ($259/year license), Google Search Console’s Page Indexing report catches the highest-priority issues at no cost. It will not map redirect chains or find orphan pages, but it will show you every page Google tried to crawl and failed, which covers the errors most likely to cost you leads.

The compound effect of crawl error cleanup is often larger than any single fix suggests. A site with 30% of its practice area pages not indexed due to various crawl issues is competing with roughly 70% of its content. Fixing the errors does not just add those pages to the index. It increases Google’s confidence in the site’s overall quality and crawlability, which can improve crawl frequency and indexation speed for future content.

The approach scales differently by firm size. A solo practitioner or small firm with 20-50 pages can audit the entire site in Search Console in under an hour — check the Page Indexing report, resolve any “not indexed” issues on practice area pages, and move on. A mid-size firm with 100-300 pages needs Screaming Frog or a similar crawler to catch structural issues Search Console does not surface clearly, like orphan pages and redirect chains. A large firm with 500+ pages and multiple subdirectories should run automated crawls on a scheduled basis and assign a specific person or agency to triage the results monthly.

Two numbers tell you the severity: the percentage of your practice area pages currently not indexed (check Search Console’s Page Indexing report right now), and the estimated monthly lead value of those pages. Multiply them. That is the cost of every month you delay. A site with 30% of its practice area pages invisible to Google is competing with 70% of its content — and no amount of content investment, backlinks, or schema markup compensates for pages Google cannot see.