Search engines uses Status codes to understand your websites
Search engines use HTTP status codes to interpret and evaluate a website's health and accessibility. Status codes like 200 (OK), 404 (Not Found), and 301 (Moved Permanently) signal to crawlers whether pages are available, broken, or redirected, influencing how the site is indexed and ranked.
Background
- HTTP status codes are three-digit numbers (e.g., 200, 404, 500) that a web server sends back to a browser or crawler to indicate what happened when it tried to load a page. Search engines like Google use these codes to decide how to index (list in search results) or remove a site's pages.
- A "200 OK" means the page loaded fine and can be indexed. A "301 Moved Permanently" tells the search engine that the page has permanently moved to a new address (and passes most of its ranking power — "link equity" — to the new URL). A "404 Not Found" signals the page doesn't exist; persistent 404s can cause the search engine to drop it from the index.
- Other important codes: "503 Service Unavailable" (tells crawlers to come back later, useful during maintenance) and "410 Gone" (a stronger version of 404, explicitly saying the page was intentionally removed). Choosing the wrong code — e.g., returning 404 when a page has just moved — can harm a site's search visibility.