A HTTP 200 status code is the server's way of saying everything worked perfectly. When your browser requests a page and gets a 200 back, it means the server found the resource, had permission to serve it, and delivered it successfully. This is what you want for all your main content pages. From an SEO perspective, 200 codes are critical because they tell search engines the page is live, accessible, and should be indexed. Google crawls a URL, sees the 200, reads the content, and includes it in rankings. If you're checking server logs or using Screaming Frog, you want your important pages returning 200s consistently. A few technical points that matter in practice: - A 200 doesn't guarantee the content is good or unique, just that the server delivered something. You can serve thin content, duplicates, or even error messages wrapped in a 200 response, which confuses crawlers. - Soft 404s are a common mistake where a missing page returns 200 instead of 404. The page says 'not found' to users but tells Google it's valid content. Fix these. - If a page returns 200 but then redirects via JavaScript or meta refresh, crawlers may still index the wrong version. Use proper 301 redirects at the server level. At Ottawa SEO, we audit status codes during technical crawls to catch issues like accidental 200s on thin pages, redirect chains that should return 301s earlier, or staging URLs leaking into production with 200 responses. A clean 200 response should pair with valuable content, proper headers (like canonical tags), and fast load times. The status code itself is just the handshake — what matters is whether the page deserves to rank once Google reads it. For monitoring, tools like Google Search Console show crawl stats, but server logs give you the raw 200 counts and response times. If you see 200s spiking on URLs you don't want indexed, check your robots.txt and noindex tags.