SIGSEGV is the operating system’s segmentation-fault signal: it means the RankGear analysis engine tried to read or write memory it wasn’t allowed to touch and was terminated on the spot. When you see it, the engine crashed rather than finished its work.
| Term | SIGSEGV |
|---|---|
| Category | APIs, Reliability and Publishing |
| Also known as | Segmentation Fault |
| Where it appears | Engine exit message |
What it means in RankGear
SIGSEGV shows up as an engine exit message when the analysis process ends abnormally. It is not a score, a factor, or a recommendation about a page — it is the reason RankGear reports that a run stopped. The engine does the heavy lifting of fetching, parsing, and comparing pages in a separate process; if that process reaches for an invalid memory address, the operating system kills it immediately and hands back the signal name. RankGear surfaces that name so you can tell a crash apart from a clean result or an ordinary network error.
How to interpret it
Read SIGSEGV as an abnormal termination, not a data finding. It rarely reflects anything about the page or keyword you were analyzing; it points at the engine or its environment — a malformed input it couldn’t parse safely, an out-of-memory condition on a very large run, or a corrupted local state. Use the visible status and any accompanying diagnostics to decide your next move: a single SIGSEGV on one run usually warrants a straight retry, while the same crash repeating on the same input signals a reproducible fault worth reporting rather than retrying. Because the process exited unexpectedly, treat any partial output from that run as incomplete.
Example
You launch a batch analysis across forty competitor URLs and the run halts partway with an Engine exit message: SIGSEGV. Rerunning the same batch completes normally, which tells you the first crash was transient rather than a problem with your keyword set. If instead it failed at the same URL every time, you would isolate that one page, capture the diagnostics, and send them on rather than burning repeated runs against a fault that won’t clear itself.
Important considerations
- SIGSEGV is a process-exit signal, not an SEO metric — it says nothing about whether a page ranks or how strong it is.
- Output from a run that ended in SIGSEGV is partial and should not be trusted or exported as a finished result.
- One occurrence is often transient; the same crash reproducing on the same input is a bug to report, not something to keep retrying.
- When capturing diagnostics to share, keep any credentials or remote publishing secrets redacted — a crash report should never carry your keys.
Related terms
Part of the RankGear glossary · how RankGear measures · the 870 factors.