Technical SEO
Status Code
An HTTP status code is the three-digit response a server returns for a request, telling browsers and crawlers what happened.
Common ones include 200 (OK), 301 (permanent redirect), 302 (temporary redirect), 404 (not found), and 500 (server error). Monitoring status codes helps catch broken pages and redirect issues that quietly damage SEO.
The codes worth alerting on are the mismatches: a page that should exist returning 404, a redirect that should be permanent returning 302, a soft 404 where the server says 200 but the page says "not found". Crawlers make decisions on the code, not the content, so a wrong code quietly instructs them to do the wrong thing. Server logs show the codes crawlers actually received, which after an incident is the difference between knowing and guessing what Google saw during the outage.
Example
A crawl of one site returns: 4,200 URLs at 200 (fine), 300 at 301 (fine if intended), 65 at 404 including 12 linked from the homepage (broken links to fix), and 9 at 500 on the checkout path (a server fault losing money right now). One column of numbers, read correctly, is the whole technical triage.
Frequently asked questions
- Which status codes hurt SEO?
- 404s on pages with traffic or links waste both; 500-range errors during crawls can get pages temporarily dropped; soft 404s (a 200 saying "not found") confuse classification; and long redirect chains leak signals. Codes doing what they should, including honest 404s, hurt nothing.
- How do I monitor status codes at scale?
- Crawl the site on a schedule and diff against the previous crawl, and watch Search Console's Pages report for spikes in errors. For crawler-facing truth, server or CDN logs show the exact codes Googlebot received, which matters most during and after incidents.
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