Rules: HTTP & Transport

HTTP transport is the backbone of technical SEO. If a search crawler cannot reliably fetch a webpage or encounters server errors, indexing immediately halts.

STATUS-404 — Broken Page / Not Found#

• Severity: ALERT (-5 pts)
• Heuristic: HTTP response code is 404 Not Found or 410 Gone.
• Why It Matters: Broken links waste crawl budget, cause negative user experience, and drop existing organic search equity.
• How to Fix:
  • If the page was permanently moved, set up a server-level 301 Redirect to the most relevant replacement URL.
  • If the link was a typo in your HTML, update the href attribute on the referring page.

STATUS-5XX — Server Error#

• Severity: CRITICAL (-10 pts)
• Heuristic: HTTP response code is in the 500–599 range (500 Internal Server Error, 502 Bad Gateway, 503 Service Unavailable).
• Why It Matters: Googlebot and other search engines will rapidly demote or de-index URLs that consistently fail with 5xx errors.
• How to Fix: Inspect your backend application logs, database connection pools, or upstream reverse proxy (Nginx/Cloudflare) configurations to fix the crash.

STATUS-LOOP — Redirect Loop Detected#

• Severity: CRITICAL (-10 pts)
• Heuristic: Crawling follows a redirection sequence where a URL redirects back to an earlier URL in the chain (e.g. A → B → A).
• Why It Matters: Search crawlers and human visitors are trapped in an infinite loop and cannot access the page.
• How to Fix: Review your server redirection rules (e.g. .htaccess, Nginx rewrite, or Next.js middleware.ts) and point the source URL directly to the final 200 OK destination.

STATUS-302 — Temporary Redirect Used Instead of Permanent#

• Severity: WARNING (-2 pts)
• Heuristic: HTTP response code is 302 Found or 307 Temporary Redirect.
• Why It Matters: Search engines do not always pass PageRank and link equity through temporary redirects.
• How to Fix: If the page has moved permanently, change the HTTP status code to 301 Moved Permanently or 308 Permanent Redirect.

STATUS-SSL — Insecure HTTP or Mixed Content#

• Severity: ALERT (-5 pts)
• Heuristic: Target URL loads over unencrypted http://, has an invalid SSL certificate, or contains mixed-content resources.
• Why It Matters: HTTPS is a confirmed Google ranking factor and modern web browsers flag HTTP pages as "Not Secure".
• How to Fix: Install a valid TLS certificate (e.g. via Let's Encrypt) and configure an HTTP-to-HTTPS redirect.

STATUS-TTFB — Slow Time To First Byte (> 800ms)#

• Severity: WARNING (-2 pts)
• Heuristic: Server response time before the first byte arrives exceeds 800 milliseconds.
• Why It Matters: High TTFB indicates server-side lag, slow database queries, or un-cached pages, hurting Core Web Vitals and crawl budget.
• How to Fix: Implement server-side edge caching, optimize database queries, or use a Content Delivery Network (CDN).