Every request to a URL receives a status code. The most important codes from an SEO perspective are:
- 200 OK — the page was served successfully; crawlers index it
- 301 Moved Permanently — permanent move; passes link equity to the new URL
- 302 Found — temporary redirect; link equity is generally not passed
- 404 Not Found — the page does not exist; crawlers remove it from the index
- 410 Gone — permanently removed; tells crawlers to deindex faster than a 404
- 500 Server Error — the server failed to process the request; crawlers may temporarily deindex the page
Common SEO issues: Redirect chains (A → B → C) dilute link equity and slow crawling. Soft 404s — pages that return 200 but show a "not found" message — waste crawl budget.
What SearchVitals checks: The Technical SEO audit fetches all crawled URLs and records their status codes. Pages returning 4xx or 5xx codes are flagged by severity and volume.