Triage Status Codes Like Search Signals
Interpret common HTTP status codes by their crawl and indexing consequences.
A crawl report lists thousands of status issues, but the team has not separated truthful removals from accidental indexability or crawl-health failures. DMAIC status triage: Define URL intent, Measure status patterns, Analyze consequence, Improve with matching response, Control recurrence. The common trap is ranking status codes by count alone. A thousand truthful 404s on retired URLs can be less urgent than 40 persistent 500s on revenue pages. Define Classify each URL group by intended state: live, moved, intentionally gone, temporarily unavailable, or crawl-rate limited. The intended state tells you whether the observed status is a defect or a truthful signal.…
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