SEO: Status code that affects your web pages ranking by the Googlebot.

This article discloses what status code you should be looking into to improve your web page ranking.

Google search console

Are you an individual looking to improve your page ranking by Google? Or an SEO guy wants to improve the page ranking of your firm? Or into digital marketing?Or a curious person to learn new stuff? You are at the right place!!!

Indexing is showing up for the race; ranking is winning. We can’t win without showing up for the race in the first place.

What is HTTP status code?

HTTP status codes are three-digit responses that a server returns at the request of a client (a browser or search engine). There are five classes of status codes, and each class conveys a different type of message:-

• 1xx status codes are informational codes.
• 2xx codes are success codes.
• 3xx redirection codes are redirects.
• 4xx are any codes that fail to load on the client-side, or client error codes.
• 5xx are any codes that fail to load due to a server error.

Why should we monitor status codes and act on them?

When it comes to making a site that is 100% crawlable, one of the first priorities is making sure that all content pages that we want the search engines to know about are 100% crawlable. This means making sure that all pages are 200 OK.

When Googlebot or any bot hits any URL for indexing and encounters an error, it terminates the process. Now, these URLs remain unindexed for a quite long time. I have seen some examples on Google search console where a URL with 5xx encountered by Googlebot is not indexed for 2+ months and we are not sure about when Google will try to reindex it. This might cause a huge loss to any organisation/ individual if their valuable pages are not indexed by search engines.

HTTP status code to monitor to improve page ranking by Google

According to my analysis, the status code that we should be looking at to improve our page ranking are:-

1. 301 multiple redirects.
2. 5xx
3. 4xx
4. Soft 404.

1. 301 multiple redirects:-

301 redirects don’t lose PageRank anymore (according to Google) but there are some cases where it does:-

• There was a bad or empty URL in the redirect chain.
• There was a redirect chain that was too long (use 3 max).
• There was a redirect loop (A points to B which points to A…)

Impact on SEO

• We would be wasting some of the crawl budgets of search engines.
• If the redirection is not properly done, we might lose indexing of our page and they won’t be available to the outside world through search engines.

2. 5xx status code

5xx errors specify server problems that prevent a page from loading. These errors may lead to a negative user experience. 5xx errors in relation to SEO can be categorized into two kinds:

• Pages that always give a 5xx error when visited. So, if a search engine bot visits this page, it encounters an error. These pages should be fixed immediately. These pages will not be indexed unless they are fixed.
• Pages that gave a 5xx status code temporarily when the search engine bot visited the page. This causes a page to not be indexed on a search engine until the page is crawled again. This number should be kept as low as possible. This can cause some of the hot pages to not get indexed on Google.

Impact on SEO:

• Pages with actual content (maybe even hot content) will not be indexed when a crawler encounters a temporary 5xx error (until the crawler visits that page again)
• Permanent 500 errors cause a bad page experience.

3. 4xx status code

4xx client error status codes are those status codes that tell us that something is not loading — at all — and why. Below are some of the most common 4xx errors with their meaning.

• 400: Bad Request
• 403: Forbidden
• 404: Not Found

Impact on SEO:

• If a page returns a 4xx error code, it means it doesn’t exist, so Google and other search engines will not index it.
• 4xx are not only bad for user experience but can also be harmful to SEO. Avoid linking out to broken content, else Google will penalise pages containing broken links.

4. Soft 404

A soft 404 error occurs when a non-existent page (a page that has been deleted/removed) displays a ‘page not found’ message to anyone trying to access it but fails to return an HTTP 404 status code. They can also occur when the non-existent page redirects users to an irrelevant page, such as the homepage, instead of returning an HTTP 404 status code.

Impact on SEO:

Having a high percentage of soft 404s wastes the crawl budget on meaningless pages thus reducing the visibility of important pages. A high percentage of soft 404 significantly affects the crawl budget.

How can we get these status code values?

The sources through which you can get these values:-

1. Your server logs (Filter out based on the user-agent you want ex. Googlebot, Applebot).
2. If you are explicitly looking for the Google search engine, then go for the Google search console.

I found few issues with the Google search console:-

• Not all data is captured in the GSC when compared with my server logs.
• It doesn’t allow us to fetch all the URLs at once for analysis.
• Manual efforts are needed to request re-indexing the URLs.

Special thanks to my friend Sandeep Reddy Biddala for helping me out doing this analysis!!

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