📘 This article explains HTTP status codes and network error types shown in Botify reports.
HTTP Status Codes
HTTP status codes are numeric values a server returns in response to a request. The specific response code consists of 3 numbers and gives the requester (e.g., browser or a search engine bot) more information about what to expect, whether content, a redirect, or an error. The first number in a status code is used to classify the response into the following families:
1xx informational response – the request was received
2xx successful – the request was successfully received
3xx redirection – something else will happen before the request completes
4xx client error – the request cannot be fulfilled due to an error by the requester
5xx server error – the server failed to produce a request
Each 3-digit status code has a specific and universal meaning so that browsers and other requesters know exactly what to expect or not to expect from a request.
Generally, 2xx and 3xx status codes are the most common to find on a website and indicate normal responses. Users might encounter 4xx errors, like a 404, for example, when a URL is mistyped or a link contains a misspelled URL. On the other hand, users might encounter 5xx errors, like a 503 status code, when a site is down for maintenance or the server is being overwhelmed with the amount of traffic it is receiving.
-1xx codes are Botify internal codes for network errors, which are stored in the same metric as the HTTP status codes, as detailed in the section below.
What are Network Errors in the HTTP Codes section?
When you see Network Errors (which appear in black in the report's HTTP status codes charts - or that you may have spotted earlier, when Botify was exploring your website, in the crawl's live stats), it means that the Botify crawler could not get any reply after requesting the page. Their error codes are all negative, and specific to Botify. Reasons include DNS problems, connection errors, timeouts, etc.
The following are network error types in Botify:
-100: Unknown error
-101: No IP address found for host name (DNS error)
-102: Connection failed on IP address provided by DNS server
-103: Timeout during connect
-104: Timeout during receive
-105: Internal error while decoding HTTP header that was received
-106: The server closed the connection without sending any HTTP header (no reply)
-107: The server closed the connection before we could send an HTTP request (Botify couldn't request the URL)
-108: Bad IP or bad port format (ex of port error: www.example.com:99999)
-110: Network error during the download of the body (content)
-120: The crawler refused the content because it was too big
-121: The crawler refused the content because the content type is not accepted
-130: Unexpected end of the reception
-140: Error during decompression of HTTP body (content)
-151: The HTTP response had no content in its body
What is an HTTP Status Code 309 in SiteCrawler?
It is an HTTP Code that Botify defined and uses in JS Crawls. It means that the page was served with an HTTP Status Code 200 code but that the JavaScript code generated a redirect to another URL.
You can check this on the URL Details Javascript tab.
