What does a healthy page status look like?
A healthy page answers immediately and says so — one clean success response, with no detour. Every extra hop between the address someone requested and the page they get is friction that crawlers budget for and eventually stop paying.
What it actually is
Every time anything asks for one of your pages, your server replies with a short code before it sends a word of content. That code is the page saying "here it is", "that has moved", or "that is gone". Machines act on it far more literally than people do: a person seeing a broken page tries again, while a crawler simply records the failure and moves on to somebody else.
Why it matters
Crawlers do not have unlimited patience for any one site. Time spent following detours and collecting errors is time not spent reading the pages you actually want indexed, so a site full of hops gets shallower coverage than its size deserves. Worse, a page that errors intermittently can be dropped from an index entirely, and getting back in takes far longer than falling out did.
What good looks like
The URL you publish is the URL that answers. It returns a straightforward success on the first request, or at most makes one permanent, deliberate hop to a single canonical address. Pages that genuinely no longer exist say so honestly rather than quietly returning a success page with nothing on it.
Being honest about it
One redirect is not a problem and we do not pretend otherwise — redirects are a legitimate part of running a site that changes over time. The cost is in accumulation, and it is gradual rather than dramatic. If your site is small and stable this is unlikely to be what is holding you back, and we would rather tell you that than manufacture urgency.
Where most sites go wrong
The most common failure by far is the soft error: a page that is genuinely missing but returns a success code along with a friendly "nothing here" message. To a machine that is a real page with thin content, so it gets indexed, competes with your good pages, and never gets cleaned up because nothing reports it as broken. The other frequent one is a chain built up over years of migrations, where each individual hop was reasonable when it was added.