Treat HTTP responses as feedback
Interpret common HTTP responses and headers as operational feedback for a scraper.
The move: convert HTTP feedback into scraper policy. A basic scraper should know what it will do before a response arrives. Otherwise the default behavior becomes accidental: retry too much, skip too quietly, or keep crawling after the site has signaled a problem. Classify the response into an action Success is not always '200 only.' Redirects may be normal. 304 is a successful cache validation. 404 might be a legitimate deletion. 429 is a pacing signal. 403 is usually not something to brute-force. 503 can be temporary, but a professional crawler backs off. Read the headers Retry-After tells you when…
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