Gary Illyes from Google said that when important URLs serve a 4xx status code, Google Search can "temporarily protect the URL from falling out of the index right away." Meaning, Google Search will still show the URL in Google Search, for a short while, just to make sure searchers can still find it.
Gary posted this comment on LinkedIn in response to VLC, the VLC media player website, not showing a favicon in the Google Search results. It shows this and also notice the home page is number two, under the download page:
SEOs were asking why is the favicon missing. Gary explained that the folks at VLC for some reason served the teapot - 418 status code and Google obviously treats it like it treats "most other 4xx errors: basically "not found," Gary wrote.
So why didn't Google drop it from the index? He wrote, "Because VLC is arguably one of the most important pages on the internet (thanks for all your hard work since... well, forever!), Search temporarily protected the URL from falling out of the index right away." I mean, it also can be because if you specifically search for the site, Google may also show it - another way of interpreting it being an important page?
Anyway, there were side effects, like the favicon not being accessible to Google. So Google stopped showing the favicon. Gary wrote, "The side effect is that since we don't know what's on the page anymore, we have nothing left to show: no snippet, no favicon, no nothing -- just the link itself and the last good title we had."
It should soon start showing the favicon as VLC's website now serves a 200 OK status, "It's returning 200 OK with content again now, so this should sort itself out soon."
Gary also wrote, "VLC folks, thanks again for all your hard work over the years! You all rock and make the world a better place."
Here is his comment:
As a note, this site's favicon disappeared for a few days last week. I was not sure why, we made no changes. So I made some tweaks to the Cloudflare settings and stuff and then waited and it came back. My gut feeling it was related to the PHP exploit stuff, which was temporary. Not that I am saying Google thinks this site is important...
Yea, the favicon for @seroundtable.bsky.social is no longer showing in Google Search - I didn't make any changes, so I am not sure why - I blame PHP - looking to see if I can make changes...
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick.com) October 29, 2026 at 7:07 AM
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Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
