You can use it to create redirects, modify HTTP headers… Cancel Unsubscribe. It will help you to familiarize yourself with most of them so you know how to work with them.  Here is a list of the more common HTTP status codes: Seach engine optimization specialists need to know these status codes intimately and understand the purpose that each response code serves. While not directly related to SEO, helping a site be more secure is never a bad thing. The first and most common one is the 404 not found HTTP status code. We’ll look these in the HTTP Headers section below. After doing this, you will continue to copy the meta tag (code) which Google gives you into the Header Code section of your website. Google, PayPal, Twitter, Stripe, DropBox, Facebook and LastPass are a few of the well-known sites on the preloaded HSTS list. They are quite common, especially on large-scale websites. In the real world, visitors will never see this status code. While Google will interpret a 404 as an accidental error and will keep a URL serving a 404 in its index for a while, a 410 response is seen as an explicit request to remove that URL from Google’s index. Real-World SEO Application: If a page has a status code of 200 OK, you don’t really ne… At the same time, Google spokesman John Mueller said in this video that the search engine uses the headings in order to better understand the content. Try to sum up your website in a sentence or two. In the long term, however, Google interprets a 302 redirect as a permanent 301 redirect and will start to handle it accordingly. That’s how I recommend you find the description in your source code. HTTP headers play a big role in security, too, as proper use of the right HTTP headers can make a website less vulnerable to a range of potential security issues. Its use should be limited to once per page ideally for the title of the page Or by its more used name – h tags. Google reports these server errors in Search Console: For SEO, the impact of these errors is primarily one of crawl efficiency. If you’re going to be successful at SEO copywriting you’ll have to dip into HTML a little, as we saw in Make Title Tags Work for You, but you don’t need to be a fully fledged geek.. Six header tags. The following is an older video from ex-Googler Matt Cutts explaining how Google handles 404 and 410 status codes, but it’s still a very good one to watch: In the course of your SEO career, you will come across many 4XX HTTP status codes, but few will be as infuriating as the 429 response. Let’s look at a number of important HTTP header elements for SEO next. Subscribe Subscribed Unsubscribe 229. This can be hard to identify, as Google doesn’t report 429 responses in Search Console. However, you can also send a canonical link as part of a URL’s HTTP Header. The 429 response indicates a client has made too many requests in a given period, and instead of a URL’s proper response, you get the 429 response instead. Some rate-limiting technologies also block Googlebot this way, which could have profound repercussions on the speed and efficiency with which Google can crawl a site. Server. A 404 error is indicative of an accidental error, a wrongly entered link somewhere. We see it from time to time on websites that are served over HTTPS and are on the HSTS preload list. Note that following some, or most of these practices on any website is a good idea, however implementing them will be slightly different. On the other hand, an “HTML header” is the code section between the