Definition
An HTTP status code is the three-digit number a web server returns with every response, telling the client what happened with the request. The ranges carry the meaning: 2xx is success (200 OK), 3xx is redirection (301 permanent, 302 temporary, 304 not modified), 4xx is a client error (404 not found, 403 forbidden, 410 gone, 429 too many requests), and 5xx is a server error (500 internal error, 502 bad gateway, 503 unavailable).
For anyone working on a website's SEO or reliability, status codes are the primary diagnostic. Search crawlers act on them: a 200 means index this, a 301 means follow to the new URL and pass signals there, a 404 or 410 means drop this from the index, a 503 means come back later.
Serving the wrong code — a "soft 404" that returns 200 with an error page, a 302 where a 301 was meant, a 500 under crawl load — sends the crawler the wrong instruction and causes indexing problems that are invisible unless you look at the codes.
In context
In iGaming SEO, status-code hygiene comes up constantly because affiliate sites churn through URLs: offers expire, operators leave a market, comparison pages get restructured, GEO sections are added and removed. Each of those changes needs the right code.
A retired offer page that should consolidate into a category hub gets a 301 to that hub; one with no sensible target gets a 410; a page that is temporarily down for maintenance gets a 503 with a Retry-After, not a 404. Getting this wrong scatters ranking signals and leaves dead pages in the index.
Status codes also matter for tracking and crawl budget. Redirect chains (a link that 301s to a URL that 301s again) waste crawl budget and can drop parameters; they should be collapsed to a single hop.
A spike of 5xx during a crawl tells Google the site is unstable and it will slow crawling, so server capacity and error rates are monitored as an SEO concern, not only an ops one. Regular crawls of the site to audit the distribution of status codes are a standard part of technical SEO maintenance.
Worked example
An affiliate restructures its slots section and 302-redirects 400 old URLs to new ones. Rankings for those pages drop because 302 signals "temporary" and Google keeps the old URLs indexed while not fully crediting the new ones.
Switching the redirects to 301 recovers the rankings over the next few weeks.
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