304 Not Modified
The requested resource has not been modified since the last request, and the cached version can be used.
Use Cases
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How does 304 Not Modified affect Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
How does Google treat Redirection 3xx HTTP response status codes?
Googlebot follows up to 10 redirect hops. If the crawler doesn't receive content within 10 hops, Search Console will show a redirect error in the site's Page Indexing report. The number of hops Googlebot follows is user agent dependent; for example, Googlebot Smartphone may have a different value than Googlebot Image. In case of robots.txt, Googlebot follows at least five redirect hops as defined by RFC 1945 and then stops and treats it as a 404 for the robots.txt file. Any content Googlebot received from the redirecting URL is ignored, and the final target URL's content is considered for indexing.
Specific information from Google on HTTP response status code 304:
Googlebot signals the indexing pipeline that the content is the same as last time it was crawled. The indexing pipeline may recalculate signals for the URL, but otherwise the status code has no effect on indexing.
Information from Internet Standards from IEFT
The 304 (Not Modified) status code indicates that a conditional GET or HEAD request has been received and would have resulted in a 200 (OK) response if it were not for the fact that the condition evaluated to false. In other words, there is no need for the server to transfer a representation of the target resource because the request indicates that the client, which made the request conditional, already has a valid representation; the server is therefore redirecting the client to make use of that stored representation as if it were the content of a 200 (OK) response. The server generating a 304 response MUST generate any of the following header fields that would have been sent in a 200 (OK) response to the same request: Content-Location, Date, ETag, and Vary Cache-Control and Expires (see [CACHING]) Since the goal of a 304 response is to minimize information transfer when the recipient already has one or more cached representations, a sender SHOULD NOT generate representation metadata other than the above listed fields unless said metadata exists for the purpose of guiding cache updates (e.g., Last-Modified might be useful if the response does not have an ETag field). Requirements on a cache that receives a 304 response are defined in Section 4.3.4 of [CACHING]. If the conditional request originated with an outbound client, such as a user agent with its own cache sending a conditional GET to a shared proxy, then the proxy SHOULD forward the 304 response to that client. A 304 response is terminated by the end of the header section; it cannot contain content or trailers.
Source: 304 Not ModifiedGooglebot signals the indexing pipeline that the content is the same as last time it was crawled. The indexing pipeline may recalculate signals for the URL, but otherwise the status code has no effect on indexing.