Google might ignore your expires headers

If you haven’t seen it yet, Martin Splitt’s SEO Mythbusting (with Alexis Sanders) about crawl budget, please stop now and watch it.

So many amazing insights in less than 20 minutes.  

I would like to put a spotlight into a newsworthy statement that somehow has stayed under the radar.

expires headers

According to Martin:

We might ignore caching headers. So if you’re like telling us this expires tomorrow, and we’re like, no it does not, then we might just cache it nonetheless

Expires headers signal if a site’s resource (such as CSS or images) needs to be requested or to be fetched from the cache. By setting an expiration date you set a time in the future when these files will be expired. 

For example, let’s say you have an article page that barely changes or being updated There’s not a good reason for Google to waste resources and render its images and CSS every time. So if by accident or not you set that expiration date for 1 day or 1 week (or more), Google may ignore it.

Have someone spotted this before?

Posted by Roey Skif

Leave a Reply