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The Number Game of SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is considered to be one of the finest and glorious professions among all IT fields, that includes graphic designing, development and others because it requires a different kind of mind set and to become successful one have to stay on his toes all the time. If you are in the profession of little more than 6 months you will probably knew of the numbers like 301, 302, 404, 410 and others, so what they are, and what it all have to do with SEO? For those who didn’t have a clear idea of what these numbers are all about and what they mean, let’s start with the quick glossary first:Resource has moved. The Response will include different locations from which user can select most appropriate.

Resource moved permanently to a new location.

Resource has moved temporarily to a new location.

Bad request or server didn't understand your request due to bad syntax.

Page not found.

The resource has gone permanently.

• 300
• 301
• 302
• 400
• 404
• 410

Status codes play a vital role in SEO. codes like 404, 301 and 302 are the most common and important codes in the SEO profession.

How to get benefit from status codes: If you have a website/blog for a certain amount of time and you update it frequently like moving, and building content on your website, then you can surly get benefit from this. All you have to do is to download Screaming Frog, FREE small desktop program you can install on your PC or Mac which crawl all ’website’s’ links, images, CSS, script and apps from an SEO perspective. The software will spider your site and will tell you the detail of how many URL in your website contain 404, 302, 301 or others… Once, you have the data now let the game begin, start collecting the URLs that contain 404 and 302 pages and add them all in the excel sheet. Every page contain an individual value in a website and sometimes 404s and 302 pages contains some external and internal links pointing to them and have some search engine value. It is advisable to add 301 to all 404 and change 302 so that link juice can be transferred to the new page, adding 301 will pass link juice (302 does not pass link juice) to the new page thus the page will gain more value and possibly better search engine rankings.

Warning: Do not add 301 to home page for all the 404 pages as this will end up providing bad user experience, instead, add 301 to relevant pages that build websites user experience better. Link building is difficult and boring but there are always some low hanging fruits you can pick. Try this out to get some quick link value for your desired pages.