Google can protect an important URL from being deindexed on a 4xx

Gary Illyes from Google said on LinkedIn this week that Search can hold an important URL in the index. It can do this for a short time. The URL has to be returning a 4xx error. Search Engine Roundtable reported the comment on 5 November 2026 and included a screenshot. The live example was the VLC home page. It was serving HTTP 418, the "I'm a teapot" code.

What Illyes said

Illyes wrote his comment in reply to another user on the thread. He called VLC "arguably one of the most important pages on the internet". He then wrote that Search had "temporarily protected the URL from falling out of the index right away".

The protection is not a bug in how Google reads the status code. Search treats 418 as any other 4xx error. The normal rule is that a URL serving a 4xx will drop out of the index. For URLs Google already treats as important, Search can delay that drop for a short while.

The thread does not give an exact length of time. Illyes wrote that the problem "should sort itself out soon" once VLC's site returned a 200 OK.

What the word "important" is doing

The word doing the work is "important". Google has not published a definition of which URLs qualify. The thread does not try to give one. The named example is the home page of a piece of software used by hundreds of millions of people. Site owners reading this should not assume their own pages carry the same reputation. Product pages, blog posts and category pages are not VLC.

The VLC comparison sets a high bar on its face. What the comment does establish is that this behaviour exists at all. Before this, the working assumption was simpler. A 4xx meant a URL would fall out of the index on the next crawl. No delay was expected.

What it changes for a site owner

Two working conclusions for a team watching its own search traffic.

First, a brand home page or a widely cited page that returns a transient error has a short grace period. The site still has to fix the error. The URL is less likely to vanish on day one than the common assumption suggested.

Second, the protection does not reach the pages most sites worry about. A new URL with no built-up signal still falls out quickly on a 4xx. A long-tail product page does too. A category page with few external links does too. Google will not spend the index position on a page it does not already reward.

For teams running monitoring on their own URLs, this does not change the alert threshold. A 4xx on any page still needs a same-day response. It does change the panic level on an alert for a brand page.

Source

Search Engine Roundtable: Google Can Temporarily Protect Important URLs From Being Deindexed, reporting on Gary Illyes's LinkedIn comment thread.