What Are Status Codes?

What are status codes? I’m sure most of us have come across a 404 not found code on a web page. But what does this really mean and what are some other status codes? Also, how does this impact SEO? Here are a few status codes and what they mean.

1xx: Informational. These don’t show up to humans. Informational codes will lead to another code after processing it. No need to focus on these.

2xx: Success: If your page comes back a 200, good news! This is a success, and there are no problems accessing the page.

3xx: Redirection: There are two types of redirection codes: permanent(301) and temporary(302). Permanent redirects are more common, and it’s pretty self-explanatory, these pages are permanently redirected to another page that no longer has an index on Google. On the other hand, temporary redirects are for when there’s a plan for the page to return.

4xx: Client Error: 404(not found pages) can actually benefit your site, especially if the 404 code is branded. These pages are used to bring people to other places on your site when that page isn’t found. Some other 4xx status codes include 401/403 which are unauthorized/forbidden, and 410 which means the page is gone.

5xx: Server Error: These are status codes you really want to pay attention to. If you’re seeing this, you’ll want to investigate it on your site platform. These codes are related to response and server issues. A 500 status code indicates a server error, where 503 means unavailable. Sometimes 503 codes come up because of an overload on the page. Another one you might’ve seen is a 502 which means bad getaway, which is when the response was invalid for the page.

I hope this was helpful in understanding some issues your site might have. It is imperative to have an understanding of these status codes, and how to identify issues and fix them. Semrush has an extensive list of status codes to explore and familiarize yourself with. Moz is a really good software that identifies these issues and provides directions on how to fix them on your site. Screaming Frog will tell you what status codes your pages are returning as. If you’d like to set up a website-specific audit where we can evaluate where’s best to start with your site, please reach out to bayrockdigitalmarketing@gmail.com.