Google: your website should not have pages with 5xx status codes

On Twitter, Google’s John Mueller confirmed that your website should not have pages that deliver a 5xx status code. 5xx status codes indicate server errors. If your web pages deliver such a status code to search engines, search engines will think that your website is broken, even if the page can be displayed in your web browser.

avoid 5xx http status codes

Avoid 5xx status codes and show 404 for invalid URLs

John Mueller also said that Google will visit URLs as long as there are external links that point to that URL, even if the URL delivers a 404 HTTP status code:

For that reason, it’s a good idea to redirect your old URLs to new pages on your website.

How to check the HTTP status codes on your website

HTTP status codes are invisible. Your web browser can show the correct page while sending an error code behind the scenes. There is something wrong with your web pages if they do not deliver a “200 OK” HTTP status code.

The website audit tool in SEOprofiler checks the HTTP status codes of your web pages so that you can fix errors quickly and easily:

HTTP response code check

In addition to this, the website audit tool checks your pages for any other things that influence the position of your web pages on the search results pages of Google and other search engines.

Check your pages now

Create your SEOprofiler account now to get a website audit report for your own website:

Check your pages now

Tom Cassy

Tom Cassy is the CEO of SEOprofiler. He blogs about search engine optimization and website marketing topics at “http://blog.seoprofiler.com”.