Want to know how much website downtime costs, and the impact it can have on your business?
Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021
In a Google Webmaster Central Hangout recently, a question was put to Google’s John Mueller.
“Wondering if Google checks status codes before anything else, like before rendering content?”
This is a great question to John – in very simple terms do Google care about the status code on your website?
The answer is categorically yes. Google does indeed check the status code of a website page before indexing it, or rendering content.
A 200 “OK” success status code is the standard response for successful HTTP request, and for a page that is working correctly. As such the Google crawler looks for the 200 status code before it does anything else – it tells Google that there may be content on that page that it should index.
Alternatively if a page responds with a status code that suggests an error with page, e.g. a 4xx or 5xx status code, or redirect then this is a signal that Google uses in its decision not to go ahead and start indexing the page.
Given the important of rendering content and indexing it in Google website owners should ensure that their website is giving a correct status code at all times. A website monitoring tool such as StatusCake can be used to alert you if a status code other than the OK “200” is being triggered. So for instance if your website starts responding with a 4xx or 5xx status code you’ll be alerted immediately. Status code monitoring means you can ensure pages on your website which respond with the wrong code are immediately corrected, ensuring your site content doesn’t get ignored by Google leading to a fall in traffic to your website, and thereby revenue.
StatusCake Team
Share this
More from StatusCake
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 2)
6 min read The Real Cost of Owning Monitoring Isn’t Code — It’s Everything Else In Part 1, we explored how AI has dramatically reduced the cost of building monitoring tooling. That much is clear. You can scaffold uptime checks quickly, generate alert logic in minutes, and set-up dashboards faster than most teams used to schedule the kickoff
James Barnes
March 11, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 1)
5 min read AI Has Made Building Monitoring Easy. It Hasn’t Made Owning It Any Easier. A few months ago, I spoke to an engineering manager who proudly told me they had rebuilt their monitoring stack over a long weekend. They’d used AI to scaffold synthetic checks. They’d generated alert logic with dynamic thresholds. They’d then wired everything
James Barnes
March 4, 2026
Alerting Is a Socio-Technical System
3 min read In the previous posts, we’ve looked at how alert noise emerges from design decisions, why notification lists fail to create accountability, and why alerts only work when they’re designed around a clear outcome. Taken together, these ideas point to a broader conclusion. That alerting is not just a technical system, it’s a socio-technical one. Alerting
James Barnes
February 25, 2026
Designing Alerts for Action
3 min read In the first two posts of this series, we explored how alert noise emerges from design decisions, and why notification lists fail to create accountability when responsibility is unclear. There’s a deeper issue underneath both of those problems. Many alerting systems are designed without being clear about the outcome they’re meant to produce. When teams
James Barnes
February 18, 2026
A Notification List Is Not a Team
3 min read In the previous post, we looked at how alert noise is rarely accidental. It’s usually the result of sensible decisions layered over time, until responsibility becomes diffuse and response slows. One of the most persistent assumptions behind this pattern is simple. If enough people are notified, someone will take responsibility. After more than fourteen years
James Barnes
February 11, 2026
Alert Noise Isn’t an Accident — It’s a Design Decision
3 min read In a previous post, The Incident Checklist: Reducing Cognitive Load When It Matters Most, we explored how incidents stop being purely technical problems and become human ones. These are moments where decision-making under pressure and cognitive load matter more than perfect root cause analysis. When systems don’t support people clearly in those moments, teams compensate.
James Barnes
February 4, 2026