Reading status-code patterns like a doctor

Reading status-code patterns like a doctor

Individual status codes are noise; patterns are signal. References on what clusters mean.

→ Google's HTTP status code handling doc — exactly how Googlebot treats 3xx/4xx/5xx for indexing.
Takeaway: a 4xx drops the URL; a 5xx makes Google retry and back off.

⭐ Pick of the week: the soft-404 detection idea — pages returning 200 that look like 'not found'. Cross-reference thin pages Googlebot hits repeatedly.
Takeaway: 200-status soft-404s quietly waste crawl and tank trust.

→ The 'spike in 304 Not Modified' read — good conditional-GET behavior, a sign of efficient crawling.

→ Screaming Frog's notes on response-code segmentation by template.

→ Google's redirect-chain guidance — chained 301s burn crawl per hop.

Credit to Google Search Central and Screaming Frog.