A 200 status tells a crawler the page is live and its content can be read, indexed and ranked. Every canonical, indexable URL on your site should return 200 — if key pages return errors or redirects instead, they may drop out of the index.
Watch for two traps. A "soft 404" returns 200 but shows an empty or error-like page, confusing Google about what to index. And pages that should be removed shouldn't silently return 200 forever — use the right status (301, 404 or 410) so crawlers understand your intent.
In an audit, confirming that important URLs return a clean 200 — not a redirect chain ending in 200 — is a basic but essential check.
This is a technical SEO topic I handle for clients:
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