Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that your web pages do not get better rankings if they are crawled more often by Google. A webmaster wanted to know if Google changed crawling behavior if pages delivered a “304 not modified” HTTP status code instead of a “200 OK” HTTP status code.
John Mueller said one year ago that a 304 HTTP status code means that Google’s crawler doesn’t have to request the full page:
No, it just doesn't need to request the full page at that moment, I don't think that would change future requests.
— ? John ? (@JohnMu) March 29, 2018
He added yesterday that Google crawls websites that do not change often less, and that more crawling does not mean better rankings:
If we assume that a page doesn't change frequently, we might crawl it less, but that's fine (more crawling doesn't mean better ranking). Overall, a 304 is more a sign that we can crawl a site more (since the bandwidth & open request are released).
— ? John ? (@JohnMu) July 10, 2019
How to check the HTTP status codes of your web pages
Use the website audit tool in SEOprofiler to check the HTTP status codes of your web pages. The website audit tool will also inform you about other issues than can influence the position of your pages in Google’s search results:
