Mistake: filtering out 304s before measuring crawl efficiency

Mistake: filtering out 304s before measuring crawl efficiency

People drop 304 Not Modified as noise and lose the best signal of healthy caching. Reads:

→ MDN (conditional requests) — A 304 means Googlebot sent If-Modified-Since / If-None-Match and you saved the payload. Lots of them is good.
Takeaway: track the 200:304 ratio per template, not just total fetches.

→ Google Search Central (HTTP caching) — Confirms Googlebot honors validators and that 304s reduce crawl cost.
Takeaway: missing 304s on stable pages = your server isn't sending Last-Modified/ETag.

★ Pick of the week — an ETag audit script (community) — Cross-checks which 200-heavy URLs never return 304.
Takeaway: those are your caching gaps — fix the headers, watch fetches drop.