HTTP Request headers

Does googlebot read them ?

[bcc1234]

Hi,

Does anybody know if googlebot reads the response headers ?

Fields like Expires, Last-Modified ?
What about fileds like ETag and SessionID ?

Is there a chance of pages not being indexed because the bot tought they are dynamic and would not be valid for subsequent requests ?

What about cookies ?

Thanks.

[ciml]

Personally, I haven't experienced any changed to Google's behaviour based on headers.

Lots of pages use cookies, I can't imagine Google having a problem with them (unless you require a cookie to be returned, in which case Google and other users won't get access.

[Brett_Tabke]

There were a few that I heard of that had been messing with headers to see what effect it would have. The most interesting would be the expires, and last modified headers. We thought maybe "Fresh!" was based upon last modified. I can't see any effect in using it or not using it, but that doesn't mean it might not be part of a larger set of criteria. I'd think if you have last modified available, it would be wise to use it.

[bcc1234]

Well, I'm more worried about Etag and Set-cookie.

I'm sure having Last-modified set to like 2 days ago is nice but I think googlebot is smart enough to actually check the contents against the cache.