Tweets: Google Explained How It Decides Which Refreshes Get Recrawled First

1. Google quietly rewrote its crawl budget docs this month. New line: "Every site starts with the same default, conservative crawl capacity limit." That budget is earned back, not handed out. Here's what that means for your refresh schedule. [LINK]

2. If you've ever refreshed a post and watched weeks pass before Google noticed, there's a reason. Crawl capacity is judged by site size, update frequency, page quality, and relevance. Cosmetic refreshes don't move any of those. [LINK]

3. Google's new crawl budget guidance names four demand factors directly: size, update frequency, page quality, relevance. A refresh that only changes the date checks one box and fails the other three. [LINK]

4. New from Google: support 304 Not Modified responses. Tell Google a page hasn't changed and it reuses the cached version instead of redownloading, freeing up budget for the pages that actually did change. [LINK]

5. Rankings have been unusually volatile since July, with unconfirmed spikes on the 11th, 18th, 24th, and August 1st through 3rd. Panic refreshes during weeks like that spend crawl demand instead of building it. [LINK]

6. Refreshes on strong pages tend to get crawled fast. Refreshes on ignored, low-authority pages can sit for weeks. Google has less reason to recheck a page it doesn't already trust. [LINK]

7. Quick check: pull Search Console's Crawl Stats report and compare crawl dates to your last five refresh dates. A big gap between them is your crawl budget showing itself. [LINK]