Google Webmaster Tools Warns Of Spikes in Bandwidth Fees

[Webnauts]

I mentioned a while ago that Google requires in their webmaster technical guidelines that sites should support If-Modified-Since HTTP headers, and the answer of some members was, that it is not obligatory.

But here is exactly what Google says:

Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.

Source: Webmaster Guidelines

At some point I just gave up the discussion, since I already implemented those headers on my sites, and I realized that it did not make any sense to discuss any further.

But yesterday I was reading this Google Webmaster Tools Warns Of Spikes in Bandwidth Fees and I thought of sharing these news.

The issue there is not directly about the implementation of that HTTP header, but looking into that a bit deeper, you will see the sense of it in this case, since the primary issue is bandwidth.
To go a bit further, see the comments of the Google employee John Mu on this topic: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/017751.html#comment-1056547

[kgun]

That seems natural to me. Most often W3C tags are meningful, even if some are deprecated.

[incrediblehelp]

Those damn hungry googlebots.

[Lorel509]

Sounds like a dynamic URL problem.

From Google's Webmaster Guidelines:

"Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page."

[Lorel509]

Sounds like a dynamic URL problem.

From Google's Webmaster Guidelines:

"Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page."