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Do 404 or 301 pages count towards my render counter?

All renders including redirects, errors, and other non-200 responses count toward your usage.

Overview

All pages that Prerender renders, regardless of the HTTP status code are included in your monthly render count. This means 200 OK responses, 301 redirects, 404 errors, and even 500 server errors will count toward your usage which is why it's important to keep your URLs in check to avoid wasting renders on broken links, unnecessary redirects, or error-prone pages.

By regularly auditing your site’s link structure, and leveraging Prerender’s filtering tool (like Ignore URL feature), you can reduce your render usage, stay within your usage limits, and ensure that only valuable content is being cached for the bots.

Possible Causes / Scenarios

Here are the common reasons your render counter is high:

1. Bots Request Invalid or Obsolete URLs

Search engine crawlers frequently crawl outdated links or paths that no longer exist. These trigger 404 pages which still get rendered and counted. Prerender renders every page that is requested from our service no matter the status code.

2. Large number of redirects

Prerender does not follow redirects. If a page returns a 301 or 302 response, Prerender will render and count that redirect response as is. It will not automatically fetch and render the destination page. If the redirected page is also requested later (or by another bot), that counts as a separate render. 

Solution: If your REST endpoint returns a 301 (permanent redirect) and you want crawlers to follow the redirect, add the following meta tag for the status code and header:

<meta name="prerender-status-code" content="301">
<meta name="prerender-header" content="Location: http://www.example.com"

3. Soft404 pages and Url parameters are rendered and cached

Soft 404 pages are non-existent pages that still return a 200 OK status code so Prerender treats them as valid and caches them.

Prerender treats every unique URL including those with query parameter as a separate render. For example:

  • /blog

  • /blog?utm_source=newsletter

  • /blog?page=2

Even if the content is the same, the urls with these query parameters will be rendered and cached individually unless steps are taken to filter them: Ignore URLs and query parameters

Solutions / Tips

  • Use tools like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console to identify broken or outdated links still in use.
  • If the invalid URLs are within your control (e.g., on your own site or in your sitemap), correct or delete them.
  • Prevent crawlers from accessing outdated or irrelevant pages (e.g., /old-products, /temp, /dev) by disallowing them in your robots.txt file.
  • Exclude specific URL patterns (like /404, /invalid/*) from being rendered by adding them to the ignored list. You can check this page for more information about how to use our Ignore Url feature: Ignore URLs and query parameters

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