What are HTTP status codes – SEO best practices

What are HTTP status codes?

Its an three digit numbers that shows the status of the HTTP(HyperText Transfer Protocol) request when a visitor or search engines makes a request to a web host.

Why you should understand the HTTP status codes?

At times even your own blog or website may show these codes and you get confused and question yourself what are these numbers, why do i get these and how do i fix it. For this reason you should understand the HTTP status codes and Some codes may even impact your SEO.

Types of HTTP status codes

(XX imply the number in 100s)

1xx – Receiving request and continuing process (Informational)
2xx – The requested process is successfully completed (Success)
3xx – Needs additional action to complete the request (Redirect)
4xx – Error, bad syntax which means the request cannot be fulfilled (Client Error)
5xx – Server fails its task when client requests (Server Error)

Some common HTTP status codes

For the sake of SEO you must know about these common HTTP status codes

200 Success
This is the normal response to a successful HTTP request which occurs in most of the cases, so you no need to give importance to this.

301 Moved Permanently
Each and every request is redirected to specific URL which means a page has permanently moved to a new location. You should use 301 redirect to your home page if your url doesn’t exist no longer

404 Not Found
This you might seen in most of the websites. If you haven’t made 404 page redirected to some other page you can see it in your own website too for eg: search yourdomain.com/something/something in your browser got that. It means the requested URL or file is not found in your server.

This post helps you to redirect 404 page to home page in wordpress.

503 Service Unavailable
This problem deals with the hosting service. Your server might be overloaded due to plenty of traffic or your hosting company may put it under maintenance then you will see 503 service unavailable.