HTTP Status Codes

Gary Illyes from Google explained two reasons why soft 404 errors are bad. Soft 404s are when a page returns a 200 status okay, but Google thinks that page should…

Google has always said that having pages that serve a 404 status code is normal; most sites have them, and when a page does not exist on your site, and…

Google Business Profiles websites, which stopped loading websites and began redirecting to the Google Business Profiles listing on Google Maps now completely 404 – as expected. It was supposed to…

A couple of weeks ago Forbes blocked its coupons directory on its website from being crawled by Google. Now Forbes has completely wiped out all the coupons from its site,…

I am not sure how many times Google has said that you do not need to disavow spammy links, that you can ignore link spam attacks and that links pointing…

The SEO topic of using a 404 versus a 410 error status code for pages not found is one of those topics that has been around for the past two…

This week, I reported about a weird ranking pattern that has been emerging with these weekend ranking Google updates. Google Search Console shows a spike in 404 errors for URLs…

I am seeing an unusual number of complaints around the reported 404 errors within Google Search Console reporting. This is specific to your URLs having /1000 appended to the end…

Google’s John Mueller answered a question about finding broken links that 404 and if there is SEO value in working on bringing those links back to life. John ended his…

Gary Illyes from Google posted how serving a 304 HTTP server status code can “backfire spectacularly,” even though the 304 can be a super useful signal for search engines.

Gary Illyes posted a new blog post on the Google Search Central site asking all of you to stop using 403 and 404 server status codes to reduce the crawl…

Here is another PSA from Gary Illyes of Google. In short, if you serve a 4xx status code with your robots.txt file, then Google will ignore the rules you have…

Gary Illyes from Google said on LinkedIn that if your server returns a 500/503 HTTP status code for an extended period of time for your robots.txt file, then Google may…

On Friday, Lizzi Sassman from Google updated the crawl budget management help document with two more topics. Specifically, Google added two new myths to the crawl budget documentation.

There is an interesting response from John Mueller of Google on what to do with URLs that may appear duplicated because of URL parameters, like UTMs, at the end of…

Google’s Gary Illyes said on the latest Search Off The Record podcast that soft 404s, pages Google thinks are 404s but return a 200 server status code, do waste crawl…

Google has deleted and 404ed the Rich media file best practices. Google said removed its “documentation about rich-media files, such as Silverlight and Flash.” Why? This is the best part,…

Google has made changes to a few of its Google search help documentation over the past couple of days. The documents updated include HTTP status codes, the Googlebot and job…

We know that sometimes Google can be triggered to treat your pages as a soft 404, essentially Google thinks that page should be 404ed and thus removed from the search…

We know that links pointing to pages that do not exist, that 404 or some soft 404, are links that are not counted by Google – that is not new….

Google’s John Mueller posted one of those PSA tweets this morning asking hosting companies that trigger robot detection interstitials to not use a 200 status code. John also said not…

Several months ago Google told us that returning a “results not found” type of page can result in Google Search considering that page a soft 404 and thus removing it…

If you have a lot of links to your site, but some of those links are pointing to pages that no longer exist and serve a 404 not found status…