HTTP Status Codes

The five classes

The first digit tells you the category, and that alone answers most questions:

What each code means for search

200 — the only code that gets indexed

Everything else is a signal about what to do with the URL, not content to rank.

301 versus 302

Both pass ranking signals. The difference is what happens to the old URL: a 301 tells Google to replace it with the target, a 302 tells Google to keep the original indexed. Using 302 for a permanent move leaves the old URL in the index indefinitely. Build the rules with the redirect generator.

404 versus 410

404 means “not found, possibly temporarily”; 410 means “gone deliberately”. Google treats 410 as a stronger signal and removes the URL slightly faster, but both end in deindexing. Neither harms the rest of the site — 404s are a normal part of the web.

Soft 404s are the real problem

A soft 404 is a page that says “not found” while returning 200, or one that redirects every missing URL to the homepage. Google detects and flags these, and they waste crawl budget. Return the correct status code.

503 for maintenance

During planned downtime, return 503 with a Retry-After header. Google will come back rather than interpreting the outage as removal. A maintenance page served as 200 tells Google every page on your site now contains the same “back soon” text.

Diagnosing status codes

# Headers only
curl -I https://example.com/page

# Follow the whole redirect chain
curl -sIL https://example.com/old | grep -E '^(HTTP|location)'

# See the codes without the noise
curl -o /dev/null -s -w '%{http_code} %{url_effective}\n' -L https://example.com

In the browser, the Network panel shows the status of every request; enable “Preserve log” before testing redirects or the chain disappears on navigation. In Google Search Console, the URL Inspection tool reports the status Googlebot last saw, which can differ from what your browser sees if the server treats crawlers differently.

Related headers worth knowing

Frequently Asked Questions