nginx: How to rewrite a request with a custom status code? (200 instead of 301)

For SEO purposes I was requested to configure redirects. Redirecting with a 30x status code is no problem and works:

        location ^/home$ {
              return 301 /foo/bar/index.html;
        };

But it seems like 301 redirects are not sufficient for crawling the page. So I was trying something like this:

        location ^/home$ {
              return 200 /foo/bar/index.html;
        }

But this results in just the string "/foo/bar/index.html" as response. Is there a possibility to redirect a request with a 200 status code?

There is probably no solution to configure nginx for this answer. Http just doesn't work like that. In our case we mapped the uri's inside the application and avoided using nginx for rewriting the uris

location ^/home$ {
    rewrite ^/home$ /foo/bar/index.html last;
    return 200;
}

The "rewrite" directive is used to change the requested URL from "/home" to "/foo/bar/index.html". The "last" parameter tells nginx to stop processing the current set of location directives and proceed with the rewritten URL. Then, the "return" directive is used to set the status code to 200.