http-status — HTTP Status Codes, Redirect Chains & Link Health

1. Description & Activation Criteria

Activate http-status when the user wants to:

• Diagnose 404 Not Found, 410 Gone, 5xx server errors, soft-redirect failures (T02-status P0), or wrong MIME headers (T04-content-type P2).
• Collapse multi-hop redirect chains (301 -> 302 -> 200, T03-redirects P1) after site migrations, domain changes, or trailing-slash/HTTPS rewrites.
• Probe same-host internal links across a site to catch broken 4xx/5xx destinations (--check-links, T16-broken-links P1).

2. Inputs & Prerequisites

• Target: Live http(s) URL (required for real HTTP status codes, redirect hop chains, and --check-links network probes).
• Key flags:
  • --skills http-status (aliases: redirects, status-codes).
  • --check-links: Probes up to 100 unique same-host internal links per run (MAX_LINK_CHECKS = 100) and emits T16-broken-links (P1) on 4xx/5xx or connection failures.

3. Step-by-Step Workflow

1. Run a live status & link-health audit:
   • Execute npx one-step-seo audit <url> --pages 20 --skills http-status --check-links --out ./seo-report (or page <url> --skills http-status --check-links).
2. Resolve non-200 landing pages (T02-status):
   • Inspect report.url vs report.finalUrl and T02-status (P0). Any indexable URL returning 4xx, 5xx, or exceeding the 8-hop redirect cap blocks search indexing and AI retrieval completely.
3. Flatten redirect chains (T03-redirects, T01-https, T17-canonical-http):
   • T03-redirects (P1) fires whenever a URL requires more than 1 redirect hop (e.g., http://example.com/page -> https://example.com/page -> https://www.example.com/page/).
   • Rewrite server/CDN redirect rules so every legacy URL jumps in 1 direct 301 hop to the final https:// canonical URL, and update internal <a href> links to point directly to report.finalUrl (0 hops).
4. Verify MIME content-type (T04-content-type):
   • Confirm HTML pages send Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 (T04-content-type P2).
5. Eliminate broken internal links (T16-broken-links):
   • Review T16-broken-links (P1) evidence from --check-links and either restore the missing target, add a 301 redirect to its replacement, or update the source <a href> link.

4. Tools & CLI Commands

# Single-page redirect chain and broken-link check
npx one-step-seo page https://example.com --skills http-status --check-links --out ./seo-report

# Post-migration multi-page status & link audit seeded from XML sitemap
npx one-step-seo audit https://example.com --crawl sitemap --pages 50 --skills http-status --check-links --out ./seo-report

# Inspect the http-status skill rules
npx one-step-seo skills http-status

5. Evidence Requirements

• Always report report.url (requested URL), report.finalUrl (landed URL), and the full hop chain from T02-status / T03-redirects evidence in report.findings.
• List every broken internal target URL and status code surfaced by T16-broken-links.

6. Expected Outputs

1. Status & Redirect Hop Table: Requested URL -> Intermediate Hops -> Final URL, HTTP Status, and Content-Type.
2. Broken Internal Link Inventory: Source page, broken target URL, HTTP status, and exact <a href> replacement.
3. Edge/Server Redirect Rules: Consolidated single-hop 301 redirect rules (Vercel vercel.json, Netlify _redirects, Nginx, or Cloudflare Bulk Redirects).

7. Limitations & External Data

• Live HTTP required: Offline file audits (--offline) synthesize a local 200 OK (text/html) response and cannot test server redirect rules or live 404 status codes.
• Polite link-check cap: --check-links is bounded to 100 unique same-host link probes per run (MAX_LINK_CHECKS) and skips paths disallowed by robots.txt.

8. Safety & Approval Rules

• Prefer permanent 301 (or 308) redirects only when a URL move is permanent; use 302 / 307 for temporary maintenance or seasonal routing so search engines retain the original URL.
• Never create redirect loops or bulk-redirect unrelated 404 URLs to the homepage (which Google treats as a Soft 404); redirect to the closest topical equivalent or return a genuine 404/410.

9. Examples

# Fail CI if a staging deployment introduces P0 status errors or P1 redirect chains / broken links
npx one-step-seo audit https://staging.example.com --pages 25 --skills http-status --check-links --fail-on P1 --out ./seo-report