Conducting an SEO audit is one of the first steps necessary to determine if the website is fit for search on SERPs. Some audit steps are well known, while others are hidden behind the curtain. Here we are on a journey to discover the unknown factors that play a major or minor role in indexing and ranking two major goals of ranking high on SERPs and winning on the high-traffic game.
The site may be missing critical elements such as the text-to-HTML ratio, an H1 tag, and minified CSS and JavaScript. Other easily found issues are duplicate or inept titles and Meta Tag issues. In case of malfunction or missing pages, one needs to explore the 500 Internal Server code that indicates the problem lies in the server. Status code 400, 403, and 404 simply indicate that the webpage is not available on the website or is unable to load. This could be due to a temporary server outage.
These codes are segmented into different types:
1xx status codes are informational codes. No SEO Value.
2xx codes are success codes.
3xx redirection codes are redirects.
4xx are any codes that fail to load on the client side or client error codes.
5xx are any codes that fail to load due to a server error.
1xx has no SEO Value
2xx Everything is okay
3XX redirect. This denotes a redirect from temporary to permanent and is of great SEO Value. 300 redirect also explains to Google the nature of redirect.
301 is from temporary to permanent. The reason may be site migration and 301 ends up transferring SEO value to the URL, that is, the subject of migration from the old one and more (redirect chain). Hence, there can be several redirects emerging from the parent URL.
Redirect Chains are bad for SEO as they hamper crawling, lose equity, and increase page load time. However, most redirects are usually from HTTP to HTTPS and this is acceptable in a limit. When 301 is considered as passing no Page Rank it is considered as soft 404. Remember to get 100% page rank the page topic should be matching 100%.
302 is a temporary redirect.
303 Multiple redirect points to several pages. In this case, the user has a choice to pick the one he or she wants.
303 See Other The location header field or response plays a role of redirection. It is placed in the response header.
“304 Not Modified” means the website has not changed since your last visit.
307 Temporarily Redirect The targeted page in this case is residing in another URL. It does not affect ranking and is good for SEO.
308 Same as 301
400 Something is not loading all well on the client side.
402 Bad Request
403 Forbidden
404 Not Found
You can find 4xxx by Screaming Frog GUI or by Screaming Frog bulk export method.
