What is HTTP?
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) allows for the communication between clients and servers on the World Wide Web.This request is parsed to create all sorts of sub-requests. As such, one request asks for a specific image, another for a snippet of text, and so on. Hypertext Transfer Protocol communication follows a few steps:
- The server receives the request.
- The server processes the request.
- The client receives the response.
- The server returns an HTTP response.
- The client sends an HTTP request to the server.
The client is usually your web browser. However, it can also be something else, like a robot crawling pages for a search engine index, for example. So, say you want to open a web page. Your browser sends the HTTP request to the server, asking to fetch the HTML document that constitutes that web page.
What are HTTP status codes?
In our example of the web page request, the server would have responded with an HTTP 200 OK status code, with the requested HTML document included in the response.Status codes are divided into five different classes or categories. Each HTTP response status code is made up of three digits. One digit for the category, two digits for further identification of the unique status code. Of course, HTTP requests don’t always receive the same successful response. And that’s why there are many different HTTP status codes.
Another common example is a 504 Gateway Timeout, signifying the server couldn’t respond to the request in time. You might have seen this one when trying to get festival tickets the moment they’re released. A well-known example is the 404 Not Found error, which means the server can’t find the requested resource. This can happen, for instance, when you’re trying to go to a URL that’s been deleted.
As such, each status code gives the client information about the request they made to the server. Too many clients (people who want to buy tickets) are trying to access the server (the festival’s website) at the same time, overwhelming the site with more traffic than it can handle.
Other usages of HTTP status codes
Or maybe you wonder how it’s possible that with so much great content on your company’s site so little is actually ranking in the search results… Imagine an API on your site is down without you realizing it. Before you know it, your customers start calling customer support complaining about their bad experience with your site.HTTP status codes and APIs
From processing payments to capturing leads, such functionalities work through APIs, and APIs work with HTTP status codes as well. Your site runs on both internal and external APIs that help provide your end-user with useful features and key functions.Knowing what the different HTTP status codes mean means you can either fix the API through coding yourself or notify the external API about the issue. What this means is that you can monitor your APIs and the status codes they return to clients to stay on top of potential crashes.
HTTP status codes and SEO
The specific HTTP status codes returned by pages impact your website’s health in the eyes of the robot. Search engines have robots that crawl your site’s web pages so the search engine can index them. Such bots do this by following hyperlinks to different pages, requesting the server to view the page.Alternatively, when deleting the page you were smart enough to place a 301 Moved Permanently redirect and you redirected the URL to a new, live web page instead. You’ve made the bot happy, and it’ll continue its crawl. To a bot, such a response may signify the poor health of a site. Say a bot is on your site, follows a URL you link to in an article, but the page has been deleted a while back.
The bot receives a 404 Not Found error response. So if your site contains a lot of 404 errors, your site’s rankings might drop in the search engine as a result.
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