HTTP Status 200

HTTP status 200HTTP status 200 (OK) means a page was found and served successfully. Only 200 URLs should appear in the sitemap and serve as canonical targets.Open glossary entry → (Hypertext Transfer ProtocolHTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is the protocol through which browsers and servers exchange web content. HTTPS is the encrypted, secure variant of this protocol.Open glossary entry →), also "200 OK", is a web server's standard response when a page exists and loaded successfully. It is the state that indexableIndexing is the step in which a search engine processes crawled content and decides whether a URL is added to the search index. Only indexed pages can appear in search results.Open glossary entry → pages should return.

Status code 200 is central to clean crawlingCrawling is the process by which a search engine bot fetches a URL and downloads its content. It is the first step before a page can be indexed.Open glossary entry → and indexing:

• Only canonical, indexable 200 URLs belong in the XML sitemapAn XML sitemap is a machine-readable file listing a website's important URLs. It helps search engines discover content more efficiently but does not replace internal linking or guarantee indexing.Open glossary entry →.
• A canonical tagThe canonical tag is an HTML link element that tells search engines the preferred (canonical) URL of a page. It helps consolidate duplicate or similar URLs onto a main version.Open glossary entry → should point to a reachable 200 page, not to a 404 or a redirectA redirect forwards users and search engines from one URL to another. It can be permanent (301) or temporary (302) and transfers signals to the target URL.Open glossary entry →.
• Targets of 301 redirects should also return status 200.

An important special case is the soft 404A soft 404 is a page that looks like an error page or redirects irrelevantly but technically sends status code 200. Search engines may wrongly treat it as a valid page.Open glossary entry →: a page signals "not found" in its content but technically sends 200. This is problematic because search engines may interpret it as a valid page. Genuine error pages should send 404 or 410 instead.