Decoding HTTP Status Codes - Digital Clicks
Do you know your 404s from your 500s? In this post, we’ll be going over some of the HTTP status codes that users sometimes encounter when things aren’t quite perfect on a website. Depending on the type of issue that a user has been confronted with, a number will be displayed on their browser that represents a technical issue with the page that they are requesting access to. We will also take you over what you can do to remediate errors so if you know that users of your site are seeing an error code featured here, then there’s (probably) no need to panic. Let’s start with the good ol’ 404 error code. Basically, this tells a user that the page they are looking for cannot be found because it has either been removed or renamed, moved to a different location in the directory structure or that the user has mistyped the URL into their address bar. 404 errors are not ideal, both from a usability point of view and for SEO performance. It’s like going to the shop you know and love to find that it’s closed up and moved without telling you the new location. If you’re responsible for a website and know that a URL has been renamed, moved or removed then it’s a good idea to put in place what is called a 301 redirect which will tell both web crawlers and visitors’ browsers that the page doesn’t exist and that they should now always go automatically to another page instead. Know anything about the process of link building? If not, maybe you should read one of our previous blog posts. Anyway, as a good backlink profile is valuable to the SEO performance of a site, 301 redirects will help here because they will enable ‘link juice’ to be transferred from one page to another. If you have altered the location or name of a URL which has some really great links pointing to it, you’re not going to want to lose this and a 301 redirect will transfer all this backlink goodness to the new page. Moving on, there’s the 500 error which is a technical issue on the server side. Fixing this one is up to whoever manages the server that is hosting the site. A 500 error code will be displayed to a user either due to malfunctioning software running on the server, or when there’s hardware damage to the server. The user has not done anything wrong here to upset the website and Google does not like websites plagued with 500 errors. It’s sign of poor maintenance and why would Google want their search results riddled with broken, malnourished sites? Best course of action if your website is giving users a 500 error: investigate and fix the hosting server. Finally, here’s one you can’t fix: the all new 451 status code. Heard of or experienced it? You will have only seen this one if the content that you’re trying to access is censored. This could be due to a block from your internet service provider or that access to the site is deemed illegal in your country. Did you know it actually took three years for a HTTP status code to be created to represent censorship? Didn’t think so! Thanks for reading our ‘Decoding HTTP Status Codes’ article. Be sure to visit the rest of our Digital Marketing Blog for all the latest happenings in Digital Marketing. We’re Digital Clicks, SEO specialists working in Cambridge with clients across the whole country. We specialise in SEO campaigns, especially when one wants to optimise for a local SEO campaign in Cambridge. For more information, any help or advice for your campaign or to know more about how we work, don’t hesitate to get in touch with one of the team. Error: Contact form not found.