Errors in Google Shopping Link Crawler leading to Massive Disapprovals

Beginning on Saturday October 15th, Google’s link crawling system started to have serious errors.

At the peak, you will find a large number of “Product pages cannot be accessed” errors, and you may also see similar image related errors.

We confirmed with a Google rep that this was an issue that they are aware of, and have seen similarly shaped spikes on numerous Google Merchant Center accounts since the weekend.

The issue has since corrected itself, so you should already see that the spike has gone down like in the picture above. If there are still lingering page link disapprovals, check the “Crawled at” date and you may see that Google has simply not re-crawled the links since the 15th.