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Outbyte PC Repair FREEClear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Outbyte Driver Updater FREEFix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Most of the crawl errors in this case did not come from the WatchNext site. They came from requests to the parent domain, which had no DNS address record. The distinction matters: a domain-level Search Console property can combine activity across several hosts, so its totals may not describe the subdomain you are trying to diagnose.
Why did Search Console show DNS errors?
In a case account published by Eugen Taranowski on September 14, 2026, the WatchNext site ran at watchnext.leyu.studio. Its team had added a domain property for leyu.studio in Google Search Console. That property covered activity across four hosts, rather than WatchNext alone.
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The account reported 453 crawl requests over a month, with 17% ending in DNS errors. Its host breakdown was:
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|---|---|
shop.leyu.studio |
234 |
watchnext.leyu.studio |
134 |
leyu.studio |
77 |
checkout.leyu.studio |
8 |
According to Taranowski, the apex host leyu.studio had no page, server, or DNS address record, and the www variant did not exist either. The account says 77 requests went to the apex and all 77 produced DNS errors. A hostname that cannot resolve to an address cannot connect to an HTTP server, so the failure occurs before the server can return a page or an HTTP status such as 404.
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The account reports 81 failed requests altogether: the 77 DNS failures and four ordinary 404 responses. These are figures from one reported investigation, not an independently verified crawl log or a general benchmark.
How can you tell whether crawl errors belong to your site or another subdomain?
Start with the scope of the Search Console property, then check the hosts contributing to its totals. A domain property can aggregate data for its subdomains; the headline total alone does not identify which host generated a request or error.
- Check the property type and domain shown in Search Console.
- Inspect the host-level breakdown before attributing errors to a particular application.
- Separate DNS failures from HTTP responses. DNS errors point to resolution or address-record problems; a 404 means a request reached a web server that returned that HTTP response.
In this case, the host breakdown was decisive: 234 requests belonged to the shop host, while WatchNext accounted for 134. Reading all 453 requests as WatchNext activity would have mixed together four different hosts.
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Why was a tempting HTML calculation misleading?
The account also reported that HTML represented 8.17% of requests across the entire property. Multiplying that share by WatchNext’s 134 requests gives roughly 11, the same number as the pages reported as crawled but not indexed. Taranowski cautions that this match does not establish WatchNext’s HTML share: the percentage came from all four hosts, whose request mixes could differ.
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When comparing two numbers, ask two questions: Is there a mechanism that forces them to match? And does the percentage describe the same population as the count it is being applied to? In the DNS example, the missing address record offers a mechanism for the reported failures. In the HTML calculation, a property-wide ratio was applied to one subdomain without host-specific evidence. The numerical match could be coincidence.
Why might Google crawl a page but not index it?
DNS errors and indexing are separate issues. After setting aside the apex failures, Taranowski’s account says 99.56% of requests were refreshes of known URLs and 0.44% were discovery. It describes one post found through an external link, fetched successfully after a server-rendering fix, and carrying its declared canonical URL, yet still not indexed.
Rank #4
That account supports a limited conclusion: the indexing status was not explained by the apex DNS failures alone. It does not establish why Google chose not to index that post, and the reported figures do not show that a particular crawl pattern caused the decision.
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The team reports adding a page at leyu.studio, redirecting www.leyu.studio to the apex, and creating a separate URL-prefix Search Console property for each site. Those changes were intended to make the apex resolve and give WatchNext a more focused report.
The account does not report post-change crawl figures or an indexing improvement. It says Search Console could take weeks to reflect changes and does not claim that either remediation caused pages to be indexed. Fixing DNS and clarifying report scope can address those problems; neither, by itself, guarantees indexing.
What to take away from this case
- Read host-level data before treating a domain-property total as the performance of one subdomain.
- Identify the failure stage: a DNS error happens before an HTTP server can respond, while a 404 is an HTTP response.
- Do not apply an aggregate percentage to one host unless you have evidence that the host has the same request mix.
- Judge DNS cleanup, report clarity, and indexing as separate outcomes.
The figures and interpretation above come from Taranowski’s case account, originally published on the WatchNext blog and republished on DEV Community: DEV Community. The described Search Console export and DNS configuration are not independently available in that account.
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