Best SEO practices for HTTP codes

Knowing what HTTP codes mean isn’t enough. In order to protect your SEO, you also need to SEOAce handle them correctly.

Here are some tried-and-true best practices:

1. Perform regular SEO audits
   SEO audits are like routine health check-ups for your website.

And since Google’s ranking algorithm likes healthy websites (meaning, sites without a lot of 4xx and 5xx status codes), keeping your website in good shape will improve your visibility in search engines.

2. Avoid redirect chains
   Using 301 redirects is usually a good thing — unless you end up with redirect chains, which are basically a series of redirects that lead from one URL to another, then another, and so on.

Redirect chains aren’t annoying just for users, they can also significantly impact your SEO efforts.

Having long redirect hoops can make GoogleBot angry – after a few redirects, it will simply stop following the chain (and therefore not index a new URL). In addition to that, the value of the PageRank also diminishes a little bit after every redirect added.

3. Change links from the redirected URL to the new URL
   It might seem simple, but it’s an often overlooked task.

If a page has been permanently moved (301), make sure that you change all links from currently leading to the old URL into the new one.

Internal links: A powerful way to boost your pages

4. Monitor your website
   If nothing else, you should always be checking your server’s performance at least.

Server downtime can severely hurt your SEO since search engines may see your site as unreliable.

Tools like UptimeRobot are designed to monitor HTTP(s) statuses and alert you when an HTTP status code error pops up.

For example, if your website goes down, UptimeRobot will instantly alert you – therefore you can fix any potential issues right when they occur on your site.

By following these best practices, you can use HTTP status codes to your advantage, ensuring search engines can easily access your content.

After all, the ultimate goal is to make your website more efficient, user-friendly and well-ranked in search engines.