Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. The SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello, welcome to SEO is not that hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, your host.

As usual, as they were on to part 27 of our SEO A to Z. Although we got and finished Z last episode, this is the episode where we're going to include some of the entries that don't fit A to Z. So these are all the ones that begin with a number and finally the hash tag, or pound as you might call it in the US. So let's get going and we'll start with 200. So 200 OK, is a response code that is served by a web server to a browser when its successor receives and responds to a HTTP request. So this code basically says yes, I understand your request. The page you want does exist, and here is the page content you want. So this is what Googlebot, what web browsers, are looking for for a successful request. They've requested a resource that exists and the server has responded successfully to them that this, this piece of content, exists. And here is the content, basically. So this is this is the. This is a response that says everything's okay.

Next up, we have 301 redirect. So 301 redirect is a response code that is served by a web server when a web page has been permanently moved from one location to another. The response will also include the path to the new web page address the page has moved to. In SEO, a 301 redirect indicates to Google that it should forward all ranking signals, including backlinks, from the old address to the new address, and all browsers, such as Chrome, will automatically follow the 301 redirect and serve the content from the new page location if someone requests the old page location. Now, 301 is really important for SEO because if you decide to remove a page or move its URL, then you don't want to lose all those ranking signals and especially any backlink signals that are built up over time on that page. So it's always safe, if possible, to do a 301 redirect when you move or delete a page.

A common way we use 301 redirects at broadband at Codeuk was when a broadband provider created a new deal, so a new broadband deal, we would create a new page for that deal with all the deal information and it would be linked to from the broadband provider and the link of all the deals in the deals tables. Now, obviously, those deals eventually would expire. The provider would often replace them with a new deal after a certain period and that deal would then be defunct and that you could no longer buy it. We would delete the page for that deal, but we would then 301 redirect the url of that pay of that deal page to the provider page. So it's sort of upper level in the hierarchy and this would mean if anyone had linked to that page for for that deal page, if anyone then subsequently followed that link, it would then be 301 redirected back to the provider's main product page essentially, which means that we wouldn't lose any backlinks that had come in to those deal pages. So real good example there of how you can use a 301 redirect to preserve seo value in pages that you've had to delete for some reason.

Next up, we've got a 302 redirect. Now a 302 redirect is a response code served by a web server when a web page has been temporarily moved from one location to another. So the response will also include the path the new word temporarily moved to. So in seo terms, the 302 redirect indicates to google that the page move is temporary and it should not forward all the ranking signals to the new new page. However, it's not always quite that simple, because google will sometimes decide to treat a 302 redirect as if it was a 301 redirect. Among the scenarios that this can happen is if you leave a 302 redirect in place for a long time, then google will sometimes go hang on. We think you leave a 302 redirect in place for a long time. Then google will sometimes go hang on. We think you've done this wrong when you actually mean a 301 redirect. So ideally you should only use a 302 if it really is a temporary move, and then you can remove it and revert back to the original page url structure before, as soon as you possibly can. All browsers like chrome. Chrome will automatically follow a 302 redirect and serve the content from the new page location.

So if, for some reason, you need to temporarily move a page, a good example of where you might use. A 302 redirect would be if, for example, you had to take a page down or parts of a site, or indeed a whole site down to do some update work on it and you wanted to make the site unavailable to the public, you might 302 redirect the urls to a holding page. That said, you know site is down temporarily for maintenance work. That's three. To redirect means that you can temporarily redirect all page rails to that page. It tells people what's going on with that 302 code so that if google comes along it knows it's temporary and to come back later. Essentially okay.

So now we're on to 404, not found. 404 not found is a response code served by web server when the page requested does not exist. Now this could happen for a number of reasons. A user could request a page that has genuinely never existed, or it could be a page that used to exist but no longer does so. In SEO best practice, always, always 301 redirect any web page you remove so that you clearly indicate to users in Google what page now replaces any removed page. If there's no direct replacement, as I said just a few minutes ago, you should 301 redirect to the previous level in your page hierarchy, such as a category page or the homepage. Okay.

So the next one is 410, gone. 410, gone is a response code that served when a page requested is no longer available and the condition is likely to be permanent. So this is a code you should use when you want to indicate to the search engine or anyone else for that matter that the page has been removed permanently. Now Google will de-index you a URL faster if you show a 410 status than a 404. So one way of de-indexing a page yet is just to remove it and leave it serving 404. Google will eventually go oh well, this page is 404-ing all the time. I'm not going to include this in the index anymore. I'll take it down. But if you serve a 410 code response code for that URL, as soon as Google comes across that it will be like gone, gone permanently. It will much more quickly de -index the page because when it starts seeing 404s it will for a while give you a bit of grace Maybe there's a problem on your site, maybe something's gone wrong, and it gives you time to essentially fix it rather than just de-indexing straight away. It will say maybe this is a mistake, we'll come back later. Later it'll check it a few times before deciding to de-index, whereas if you serve 410, you're very deliberately saying no, this page is definitely gone, it's not coming back and Google will remove it much more quickly.

So now 5 run to the all the server errors beginning with 5, and so run to 500 internal server error. So this is a response code served when a page that's requested cannot be provided due to an unexpected error. So this is usually because some part of your website has crashed or is encountering some other kind of error. Google they accept that sometimes things like this can happen. So for it to happen occasionally isn't the end of the world. But if it happens frequently, then it can begin to start affecting your rankings. So Google doesn't want to send people to a broken site. This is why you should always set up website monitoring so you can be alerted to when any kind of issues like this happen. Like a very common cause of 500 internal server errors is, if you've got a database backed site like wordpress, if your database packs up crashes for some reason, then that will quite often cause 500 internal server errors to occur all over your website, and you know you want to be alerted as soon as these kind of things happen, set up that website monitoring.

Next we've got 503 service unavailable. This is a response code that indicates the server required to complete the request is not available. So this is kind of this is a code that gets returned when a web service is overloaded. So essentially, the server that is expected to provide the service can't be contacted. This kind of thing is generally you won't get directly from the web server that is providing the actual code, because it won't. You know, if the web server is overloaded and not responding, you don't get any response. But if you're using a, a cdn like cloudflare, you'll quite often get this um error because the server that you're talking, that handles the first request, can't contact the origin server that actually has a content on it, so it returns this 503. Then you've got 504, next gateway timeout. It's similar to the service and available one and it's basically indicating the server required to complete the request cannot be contacted. And again, this is a kind of thing you'll get returned from content delivery networks like CloudFlare when it can't get a response from your origin server that's trying to forward to and to get content from to back to you.

So that covers all the response codes and we're now down to the very last item in our SEO A to Z, and that is the hash symbol, or the pound symbol, if I think you're in America, which is, you know, the two hatch lines crossed by two other hatch lines. So this symbol is used in a url. It can be used to link to an internal page anchor, so that's like a marker in the html code of a page that allows you to link to a point within a page. So this is so you can actually hop into a page directly at a point that you've marked. With these internal anchors, google will not index any urls without hashing it. They basically ignore them. So they went. They're not all positive after the hash for indexing purposes. So they're useful if you're wanting to be able to provide jump points within a page. But when Google sees links to URLs that include the hashtag, it all essentially not index those URLs with a full hashtag on. They'll just truncate the URL at the hashtag and will any any Index index based on the page before that. So that's everything we've done, the SEO a to Z. So we've gone through 27 episodes on this, so it's been quite a marathon.

I hope you found it useful. I mean obviously, I imagine, for, I'm sure, for everybody. There are things in there you knew already, but maybe there's a few things that you learnt new along the way. Maybe there's a few things that you learned new along the way. Maybe there's a few things, although you knew about them, you've learned something in addition on top that I've managed to pass along. Let's say, if you think there's anything I've missed, I'm bound to have done, I'm sure, and I'm not infallible. So therefore, just you know, get in touch, let me know anything I've missed, and that we can get them added in.

This glossaryary is available on the Keywords People Use website. If you want to go back and look at any of these items, tell me if I've got anything wrong. I'd be really interested to hear from you and if you want to share the love, then please rate, review, subscribe. It really helps. Take care and I'll see you next time. Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at Keywords People Use, that you can book a free, no obligation, one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeoplesusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.

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