HTTP Status Codes

HTTP status codes are the standardized responses a server sends when a page is requested, several of which have direct SEO implications.

200 means the page loaded successfully. 301 is a permanent redirect that passes most ranking signal to the new URL; 302 is a temporary redirect and is meant to pass little to no lasting ranking signal, since it implies the original URL will return. 404 means the page genuinely doesn't exist; 410 explicitly says it's gone permanently and won't return, which some evidence suggests Google may deindex slightly faster than a plain 404, though the practical difference is often small.

A "soft 404" is the messiest case: a page returns a 200 status code (telling crawlers it succeeded) while the actual content shown is an error message or empty result — this confuses crawlers about whether the URL is real and is a common, hard-to-spot technical SEO bug, especially on ecommerce sites with out-of-stock or removed product pages.