Today’s MarketingGoogle can temporarily keep important URLs in the index
Google’s Gary Illyes said Search can temporarily protect an important URL from falling out of the index right away when that URL serves a 4xx status code. He wrote the note on LinkedIn after VLC’s site returned a 418 teapot response and lost its favicon and snippet in results while the URL stayed listed. Google treats 4xx codes as not found for content, so it may show only the last good title and the link. Illyes said VLC was serving 200 OK again and the display should recover soon.
Our take
Do not lean on this as a safety net for your own outages. Google called out VLC as unusually important, and the protected URL still lost its snippet and favicon. Keep monitoring for 4xx spikes on money pages, and restore a 200 with the right content as soon as you can so Google has something to show again.
