Expires Header
-
We are considering adding expires header to our site. If we add this meta tag to expire for a certain date, but we do not make any changes to the site after it expires, can you be penalized for this?
-
No. The expires directive is merely there to tell the browser "this content is at least good until date X", so that the browser doesn't need to fetch it if it's got it cached.
So let's say you've got a dynamically-generated page called widgets.php, and it pulls a list of products, latest pricing, availability etc. from the database. Let's say you style the page with an external stylesheet.css, you've got some awesome wacky UI stuff in Javascript in an external wackystuff.js, and your images for navigation on the site are in /img/nav (but product images, which maybe can change more frequently) are in /img/products.
You might NOT set the Expires header on your .php files and folders, as those should be considered to expire the second after the browser fetches them. You might set the Expires header for the CSS file to a week out; same with the JS and the /img/nav folders, as those only change with a major update to the site. You might set the Expires header date for the /img/products folder to maybe an hour or two, so that if a person is flipping back and forth between pages, the browser will use the cached product image for a little while before forcing a refetch of it.
Make sense?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
E-commerce: Taking care of expired product pages
Hi, I work for an e-commerce company in the fashion sector. As you probably know/can guess it is very popular for bloggers and other influencers to link to our products. But the problem is that our products often have a lifespan of only 2-3 months before they expire. Is the best solution to do a 301-redirect to the closest category page for expiring product pages? To make sure we don't lose these links to 404-pages. Or are there any other good solutions popular among e-commerce companys? Thanks for taking your time!
Technical SEO | | Mattiasj890 -
Deal that expire what should i do?
Hey there Awesome team of Webmaster Forums, Lets assume that I have a page that have deals in it. Those deals after a certain period of time expire. What should I do with the expired pages?My opinion is this.The page keeps the same URL but inside there is a content saying "Sorry but this deal has expired .... "and have some relevant deals beneath ORRedirect to a universal expired page. Kind Regards
Technical SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
Clients domain expired - rankings lost - repurchased domain - what next?
Its only been 10 days and i have repurchased the domain name/ renewed. The who is info, website and contact information is all still the same. However we have lost all rankings and i am hoping that our top rankings come back. Does anyone have experience with such a crappy situation?
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
Rel="canonical" What if there is no header??
Hi Everyone! Thanks to moz.com, I just found out that we have a duplicate content issue: mywebsite.com and mywebsite.com/index.php have the same content. I would like to make mywebsite.com the main one because it already has a few links and a better page rank. I know how to do a 301 redirect (already have one for www.mywebsite.com) but I am aware that a 301 redirect for my index file would create a loop issue. I have read the article about redirecting without creating a loop (http://moz.com/blog/apache-redirect-an-index-file-to-your-domain-without-looping) but quite frankly I don't even have a clue what he's trying to tell me (e.g. "Create an apache DirectoryIndex directive for your document root." What????!)… So I figured a rel="canonical" tag for my index file would be easier and fix the problem, too (right??) In every "How to" description they always say you have to put the rel="canonical" tag in the header of your duplicate content file. But: My index.php has no header (or nothing that looks like a header to me)! This is what it looks like: foreach($_GET as $key => $value)
Technical SEO | | momof4
{
$$key = $value;
}
foreach($_POST as $key => $value)
{
$$key = $value;
}
$page_title="my title";
$page_description="my description";
$page_keywords="keywords";
//echo $link;
//exit;
if (!isset($link)):
$page_content="homepage.php";
else:
if ($link=="services"):
$page_content="services.php";
$page_title=" my title for services page";
$page_description="description for services.";
endif;
… ect. for the other pages So where do I put the rel=canonical tag? Or is there another solution for the whole problem? Like delete the whole index file (lol) Thanks in advance for any answers!0 -
Is the If-Modified-Since HTTP Header still relevant?
I'm relatively new to the technical side of SEO and have been trying to brush up my skills by going through Google's online Web-master Academy, which suggests that you need a If-Modified-Since HTTP Header tag on your site. I checked and apparently our web server doesn't support this. I've been told by a good colleague that the If-Modified-Since tag is no longer relevant as the spiders will frequently revisit a site as long as you regularly update and refresh the content (which we do). However our site doesn't seem to of been reindexed for a while as the cached version's are still showing the pages from over a month ago. So two question really - is the If-Modified-Since HTTP Header still relevant and should I make sure this is included? And is there anything else I should be doing to make sure the spiders crawl our pages? (apart from keeping them nice, fresh and useful)
Technical SEO | | annieplaskett0 -
Is there a work around for Rel Canonical without header access?
In my work as an SEO writer, I work closely with web designers and usually have behind the scenes access. However, the last three clients who hired me have web designers that are not allowing admin access to anyone else (including the clients) outside of their companies/small business. Is there a work around for the Rel Canonical element that usually is placed in the header? I am using All-In-One-SEO plug-in to address part of this issue. Sage advice or discussion on this is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | TheARKlady0 -
Multiple h1 headers in a slideshow
I’ve built a slideshow and each slide contains an image, h1 and text contained within a div. The slideshow grabs the whole div and slides it. My question is should I remove the h1 and style it with css e.g. my slide header or leave in the multiple h1 headers. All thoughts and comments welcome.
Technical SEO | | RodneyRiley0 -
Expired traffic and 301 value
Hi Folks, Here is our situation we have an old brand domain www.asia-hotels.com >> that was redirecting to>>www.asiahotels.com By mistake, we let that domain expired and only noticed the drop a month later We lost all our pages and this for several weeks Not sure of the exact date but approximately around 24th of December, what a merry Xmas! 😞 Since then we have repurchased the domain, Put back all the pages as they were and re-instated all the 301 redirect as they were. Since that date we haven't seen any uplift in our visits or visibility score. Did we do something wrong with our 301 redirect? I know for sure we used ISAPI rewrite mod for the non www. domain although I am not entirely sure how the www. version has been handled. Is there something we should do at a DNS level to flag the site is back? Should we presetn a reconsideration request? Any help would be greatly welcomed. Thanks for your help. Cheers, Freddy More info I placed a bit more info and the visits graph on my blog: http://www.inmarketingwetrust.com.au/seo-effect-of-domain-expiry-on-301-redirects/ I am not sure if this is due to the fact that some information is cached but when i looked at the site on opensiteexplorer I found that the data is still showing as non redirected sites: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/asia-hotels.com/www.asia-hotels.com/a!comparison effect-of-301-redirect-expired-on-SERP-visibility-300x204.jpg
Technical SEO | | Gus_Martin0