Use "If-Modified-Since HTTP header"

[SeoMartin1]

I´m working on a online brazilian marketplace ( looks like etsy in US) and we have a huge amount of pages... I´ve been studing a lot about that and I was wondering to use If-Modified-Since so Googlebot could check if the pages have been updated, and if it is not, there is no reason to get a new copy of them since it already has a current copy in the index.  It uses a 304 status code, "and If a search engine crawler sees a web page status code of 304 it knows that web page has not been updated and does not need to be accessed again." Someone quoted before me**Since Google spiders billions of pages, there is no real need to use their resources or mine to look at a webpage that has not changed. For very large websites, the crawling process of search engine spiders can consume lots of bandwidth and result in extra cost and Googlebot could spend more time in pages actually changed or new stuff!**However, I´ve checked Amazon, Rakuten, Etsy and few others competitors and no one use it! I´d love to know what you folks think about it

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

It's a tricky one, I've looked in to this also a while ago for a site I was working on. I don't have a definitive answer but we went for another solution. Creating sitemaps and using the last_modified date element in there so hopefully Google would get when we last updated the specific pages.