CODEWITHSUNDEEP
http-headerscache-control
Miki
Miki

Reputation: 9

Cache control: max-age settings

This below is the HTTP header of my site. I need to know:

what is Cache-Control: max-age=259200?

Do you think that a so high value 259200 would prevent Googlebot to index my pages? Should I lower that value?

We talk about a blog of information, publishing articles every day.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2017 15:07:53 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 123783
Connection: keep-alive
X-Powered-By: PHP/7.0.14
X-Pingback: http://www.example.com/xmlrpc.php
Link: <http://www.example.com/wp-json/>; rel="https://api.w.org/", <http://www.example.com/?p=1427>; rel=shortlink
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Powered-By: PleskLin
Cache-Control: max-age=259200
Expires: Tue, 28 Feb 2017 15:07:52 GMT

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1144

Answers (1)

SergGr
SergGr

Reputation: 23798

According to https://developer.mozilla.org/ru/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Cache-Control

max-age=<seconds> Specifies the maximum amount of time a resource will be considered fresh. Contrary to Expires, this directive is relative to the time of the request.

In other words this is time interval for which any client such as browser or proxy server might use cached version.

How exactly it affects google I'm not sure. Googlebot might take it into account in some way (but I doubt they blindly trust you). This might be an issue if you have it on your main page because the bot might not come back for 3 days (259200 seconds = 3 days) to see new articles/posts. The same goes for new comments. Still if google ignores your site for much longer than that, the issue is not with caching but somewhere else.

You might also consider looking into Google Webmaster Tools. Start at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34397/?hl=en and https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6065812/?hl=en

Upvotes: 1

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