If your web pages have the wrong HTTP status codes, Google and other search engines won’t index your web pages. Unfortunately, many webmasters don’t know that their pages deliver the wrong HTTP status codes. If search engines, do not list your pages, you should check their indexability.
What are HTTP status codes?
HTTP status codes are issued by a server in response to a client’s request made to the server. HTTP status codes are separated into five categories. Only status codes that start with 2 mean that the request was successfully received, understood, and accepted. In general, web pages should deliver a “200 OK” status code.
All other HTTP status codes mean that there was a problem with the requested page. For example, 3xx codes usually mean that the page redirects to another URL, 4xx codes mean that the page could not be found, or that there was another problem with the request. 5xx HTTP status codes mean that there was a problem with the server that delivers the page.
If you want to make sure that Google and other search engines list your web pages, your web pages should deliver a “200 OK” HTTP status code.
How to check the HTTP status code of your web pages
You should check the status codes of your web pages regularly. There can always be changes on your server that inadvertently change the HTTP status codes.
The easiest way to check the status codes of your web pages is to use the website audit tool in SEOprofiler. The audit tool automatically checks all pages of your site and it shows indexability issues on the page “Indexability”:
Click the “Show pages” button next to a status code to view the pages on your website that have the corresponding HTTP status code. It’s as easy as that.
Other factors that influence the indexability of your web pages
In addition to the HTTP status code of your web pages, the website audit tool also checks other things that influence the indexability of your web pages, including canonical tags, robots.txt and noindex tags.
The website audit tool checks your web pages for many more signals that influence the position of your web pages on search engines: duplicate content, empty titles, click depth, body text, etc.
Check the HTTP status codes of your web pages now
Create your SEOprofiler account now to check the HTTP status codes and the indexability of your web pages. The website audit report will run immediately after creating your account:
