HTTP status codes are issued by a server in response to a client's request made to the server. HTTP status codes are separated into five categories. Only status codes that start with 2 mean that the request was successfully received, understood, and accepted. In general, web pages should deliver a "200 OK" status code.

All other HTTP status codes mean that there was a problem with the requested page. For example, 3xx codes usually mean that the page redirects to another URL, 4xx codes mean that the page could not be found, or that there was another problem with the request. 5xx HTTP status codes mean that there was a problem with the server that delivers the page.

If you want to make sure that Google and other search engines list your web pages, your web pages should deliver a "200 OK" HTTP status code.

You should check the status codes of your web pages regularly. There can always be changes on your server that inadvertently change the HTTP status codes.

The easiest way to check the status codes of your web pages is to use the website audit tool in SEOprofiler. The audit tool automatically checks all pages of your site and it shows indexability issues on the page "Indexability":

Click the "Show pages" button next to a status code to view the pages on your website that have the corresponding HTTP status code. It's as easy as that.

In addition to the HTTP status code of your web pages, the website audit tool also checks other things that influence the indexability of your web pages, including canonical tags, robots.txt and noindex tags.

The website audit tool checks your web pages for many more signals that influence the position of your web pages on search engines: duplicate content, empty titles, click depth, body text, etc.

Check your website indexability now

Stay safe during these difficult times!

"Google's Danny Sullivan said on Twitter that Google's new passage indexing won't change the look of the search results. [...] Passage ranking has nothing to do with display. It's simply another ranking mechanism we will use to identify pages best relevant for a search."

Related: Optimize your web pages now with the SEO tools in SEOprofiler.

"It depends on the specific algorithm, what scores the algorithm can generate at a granular level and what it has to assume or guess for the other pages it does not have enough data to generate at that granular level."

John Mueller said on Twitter that Google's page experience algorithm and Google's passage indexing are very different things that are not related to each other.

Related: Don't do anything special about passages overall.

"If you saw declines in traffic and your site is alt-med, it is quite possible that you have done nothing wrong, but rather, Google is now able to surface some of the good content on your competitors’ pages and recognize it as more helpful than yours. However, if your site speaks on alternative medical topics and is not well supported with scientific research, recovery may be difficult."