HTTP Status Errors
Pages returning non-200 HTTP status codes — including 4xx client errors and 5xx server errors — are inaccessible to both users and search engines. Crawlers that encounter error responses stop following links from those pages, reducing the crawl depth of entire site sections. Persistent errors cause affected pages to be progressively devalued and removed from the search index.
Why it matters: A page returning a server error consistently across crawl cycles will be removed from the index within weeks, losing all accumulated ranking history for that URL.
Detected on this site: 90.0% of pages return 2xx. 1 pages return errors (4xx: 1, 5xx: 0).
Sites Most Affected by This Issue
These sites show the highest measured impact for HTTP Status Errors in our audited dataset.
View full leaderboardCommonly Affected Pages
- Recently deleted pages returning 404 instead of the preferred 410 Gone status
- Authentication-gated pages returning 403 Forbidden to crawlers that lack credentials
- Pages where server-side rendering errors cause intermittent 500 responses under load
- Misconfigured redirect rules that resolve to an error state instead of the destination
- Rate-limited API-backed pages that return 429 to crawlers exceeding their threshold
How to Fix
- 1.Diagnose and fix the root cause of 5xx errors first — these indicate server or application-level problems, not just missing pages.
- 2.For permanently removed content, return 410 Gone to signal faster deindexation than a 404 response.
- 3.Set up uptime monitoring with alerting on 5xx spikes for your highest-traffic landing pages.
- 4.Analyze server access logs to identify patterns in error responses by bot user-agent, endpoint, and time of day.
- 5.Review the Coverage report in Google Search Console weekly to catch new error URLs before they accumulate.