Thread: 304 http

I'm familiar w/ 404 and 200 but not sure why googlebot is returning some of my pages as 304.

Resolving 304 errors - general

You should never see this error in your Web browser. It should simply present the Web page from its cache - because it believes the page has not changed since it was last cached. If your client is not a Web browser, then it should equally be able to present the page from a cache. If unable to do so, it is not using the If_Modified_Since or related headers correctly.

So basically the 304 happens when I updated, I changed the page name recently, and google has yet to update my site map?

304 is not an error - it's a server response that tells a user agent, "Not Modified" -- or in more extended words, "this page has not been modified since the criteria included in your If-Modified-Since header." In such a case, the server does NOT return the document itself.

So yes, if your server is incorrectly replying to googlebot's If-Modified-Since header, then googlebot is not getting anything to index. Also possible (but I would think extremely rare) googlebot is sending a bad date or time for the If-Modified-Since. The solution? I'd make a small change to the page so that it IS now modified, and then also make sure the server is handling If-Modified-Since properly. Check the time/date setting on the server first.

Karen

If-Modified-Since header?

This is found in the sitemap generator?

No.. a 304 is the timestamp on a file. Its basically saying that.. the file hasnt changed since the last upload.. its really NOT an error, its simply saying that the cached version is the most updated, and its simply saying that a new or changed document is NOT found.

Exactly what David said above...

Karen