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There is another interesting question about status 303 and seo here but it does not answer me why status 303 appears now in GWT in the crawl errors section since end of January. In my understanding 303 status is NOT an error and there are situations where 303 is from the technical point of view the right thing to do.

See explanation of the status 303 (See other location) here:

The server returns this code when the requestor should make a separate GET request to a different location to retrieve the response. For all requests other than a HEAD request, the server automatically forwards to the other location.

So is the final conclusion that 303 is evil for SEO? Should only 301 redirect be used?

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  • Well, you are not explaining what is the situation why the 303 is an option for you this time. Since it's not a common choice I'm inclined to think that you have choosen that carefully, but still, Google may think differently. Can you provide more details?
    – PatomaS
    Commented Feb 22, 2014 at 12:49
  • In my case was a page with some url parameters. I know that I could just use 301 instead and I usually do that, but the actual question is: Why Google lists this as Crawl error? => because GWT crawl error codes are usually 5xx, like for example error 500.
    – donfuxx
    Commented Feb 23, 2014 at 9:30
  • can you post the redirection that you are using? Are you sure that the redirecting is working? Have you tried to access the resource? could it be that the redirection is working only for user agents and not crawlers? DO you have any restriction for the redirection? If everything works correctly, the crawler would just follow the indication and no problem would be reported. AT least that is what is expected.
    – PatomaS
    Commented Feb 23, 2014 at 9:46
  • See also: webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/37721/…
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Feb 23, 2014 at 12:31
  • @PatomaS The url works fine even if I do "fetch as GoogleBot" or access it with GoogleBot user-agent. I just marked all those 303 crawl errors as fixed now, let's see if they will re-appear.
    – donfuxx
    Commented Feb 26, 2014 at 18:12

1 Answer 1

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After having deleted those URLs from GWT crawl errors list they didn't appear again. Also fetch as Google bot always worked for those 304 redirect URLs. Seems like a temporary behaviour of GWT to list those 304 in the crawl errors section

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  • i was also using 303,encountered the redirect errors from google search console, and replaced now , but by 307, let's see if it works.
    – Hartmut Pfarr
    Commented Nov 27, 2021 at 23:09
  • things get explained a little further in detail, why not using 303 could make sense here
    – Hartmut Pfarr
    Commented Nov 27, 2021 at 23:20

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