What Does Google Crawl First when it Lands on your Website?

Google Checks Status Codes Before Anything Else When Crawling Content

John Mueller Google’s Webmaster Analyst explained that HTTP status codes are the first thing which Google checks when crawling your website content before rendering or indexing content.

Which status code will Google check after landing on your website?

As John Mueller explained Google will first check for a “200” status code before proceeding with further crawling.

What does 200 Status code indicate?

A 200-status code indicates “Ok Success” to Google that it’s crawling a valid page and there might be content worth indexing it.

What about other status codes?

When Google encounters status codes like 400 or 500 which indicates a “bad request” or a “server error” then Google would not proceed with rendering or indexing the content for certain website or page.

Mueller specifically pointed that Google does not see any 404 pages “YES” you heard it right so don’t waste your designer time for designing a fancy 404 page to your website because only human visitors will end up seeing it on your website not Google.

So Keep in mind, Google will not render anything unless it returns a 200 status code when it crawls for your website.

Here’s the full video of Google’s John Mueller on HTTP status codes:

Video Credits: John Mueller