504
5xxSEO: criticalRFC 9110
HTTP 504 Gateway Timeout
The upstream server did not respond in time. Indicates slow backend or database.
Indexable by Google
No
Link equity passed
No
SEO Impact
Critical
Category
5XX
SEO Impact
504 means your proxy timed out waiting for a response from your application or database. From an SEO perspective it is as damaging as 500. Common causes: long-running database queries, third-party API timeouts, inadequate server resources under load. If Googlebot regularly times out on your pages, crawl rate drops and coverage suffers. Profile and optimize slow page requests, increase proxy timeout limits, or cache expensive operations.
When to Use 504
Automatically returned by proxy servers on upstream timeout — not manually configured.
HTTP Response Example
HTTP/1.1 504 Gateway Timeout
Test with cURL
$ curl -I https://example.com/