301 and 304 Crawl Request increasing in Crawl Stats report

Regarding Crawl Requests

[Bob Smith 10]

Hello To All!

Hope all are safe and staying healthy!

I question regarding crawl request breakdown by responses, While auditing the website i noticed that, the 301 and 304 crawl request increasing in past few days.

What should i do to prevent this, why these crawl requests are increasing.

Guidance and help will be much appreciated
Please check the below given screenshot:
[prnt.sc...]

[Abaros]

I think the problem lies in the lack of knowledge of the 301 and 304 responses.

In short 301 is a redirect and 304 is that the page has not been modified since the last visit.

There is nothing wrong, from time to time Google scans the entire site and you can see these spikes.

If you have a lot of static pages (html, not PHP or other scripts) or even images that are not modified frequently you will get a lot of 304s.

If you have a lot of redirects or simply routes like "/anything" that redirect to "/anything/" you will also get a lot of 301s.

In my case I have noticed these days a lot of Googlebot activity.

[lucy24]

Have you changed anything? If not, all blame goes to the crawler for changing the pattern of its requests. (I realize this is the Google subforum, but I'm going to answer generically.)

The 301 response can mean either of two things:
(a) the crawler is requesting a lot of pages with the wrong protocol and/or wrong www (the bingbot seems to be especially fond of this) which the site is correctly canonicalizing. Their issue, not yours. If you have recently moved to HTTPS, obviously there will be a lot of 301s for a while. And certain robots always start at HTTP, even for new pages that never existed until after the site went HTTPS. (Looking at you, DotBot.) Finally, some crawlers (looking at you, Applebot) seem convinced that your real physical directories are actually extensionless URLs, so expect a lot of /directory getting redirected to /directory/.
(b) the site has done some rearranging, and now the crawlers have to catch up. I assume this is not your situation, or you would say. Certain crawlers do mass visits every few months, so there will then be an upturn in 301s while the more frequent crawlers have already caught up. Even Googlebot seems to have binges of activity where it will re-request a lot of old URLs, leading to an uptick in 301s.

Has the number of 304s increased recently? It's possible the Googlebot is sending more If-Modified-Since headers than it used to. Conversely, if you add a dynamic component to your pages--for example, putting in a php navigation header--the 304s will drop dramatically. Either way, I honestly don't think it is even worth the trouble of looking into it.