HTTP status semantics
HTTP status codes tell a crawler whether a request succeeded, moved, failed temporarily, or failed permanently.
How it works
A 200 offers a representation, 3xx redirects, 404 and 410 indicate absence, 429 asks for slower traffic, and 5xx signals a server-side failure.
How to validate it
Store every hop with status, timestamp, latency, and retry context rather than collapsing a chain into the final body.
Common failure
Returning a friendly error page with status 200 creates a soft 404 and makes failure look like valid content.
Machine-readable editions
The same article is available as Markdown and JSON. These alternates are linked here but are not submitted through the sitemap or IndexNow.