Ensure your site URLs return the correct status code and track what status code Google receives with help of Google Webmaster tools, writes Ann Smarty, citing tips from the Google Webmaster Central
Blog. Smarty has had some useful status code-related discussions and wanted to summarize them in this blog post, adding a bit of guidance from past experience.
Smarty points to the
use of 503 ("Service Unavailable") headers response code if your site goes above bandwidth, and recommends using status code 304 ("Not Modified") for pages that were not updated to economize on Google
crawl budget. "This will most probably result in deeper and more frequent crawling of the site," she writes.
Read the whole story at Search Engine Journal »