The Googlebot will now support crawling over HTTP/2 for a few of the sites starting from the month of November. HTTP/2 is the new main revision of HTTP. Google has confirmed this update in an announcement made on the company blog.

Recommendation: Google Introduces New Listing Details To Regulate In-Store Purchases

? Googlebot is learning a new HTTP dialect! ?
Starting mid November you may see some of the Googlebot crawl to happen over HTTP2 ?

Read more:https://t.co/00LVFMPXB4

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) September 17, 2020

HTTP/2 is an advancement over the HTTP because of the enhanced architecture. The built-in architecture lets it do deliver more features for the servers and the clients. HTTP/2 is more efficient, strong, and faster than the HTTP.

Statement By Google

This change is made to make the process of crawling more efficient in regard to resource usage and the server.

“With h2, Googlebot is able to open a single TCP connection to the server and efficiently transfer multiple files over it in parallel, instead of requiring multiple connections.

The fewer connections open, the fewer resources the server and Googlebot have to spend on crawling.”

This is how the implementation of the HTTP/2 crawling is going to work.

Crawling Over HTTP/2 By Googlebot

The change in the crawling for some websites over the HTTP/2 will be done in phases. The first phase will let Googlebot crawl a small number of the websites over the HTTP/2 and slowly it will expand to more websites that might gain advantage from the supported features. Googlebot takes the decision over which of the websites to crawl over HTTP/2 when asked if the site supports it and whether Googlebot will benefit anything from crawling over HTTP/2.

Websites might be eligible for the connection update if:

• Googlebot does the crawling of the website a lot already
• The server of the website supports HTTP/2

There is actually nothing the website owners have to do so as to get ready for the change. Google states that it’s fine if the server of your site only supports HTTP/1.1. There is no loss to crawling over the HTTP, and the Googlebot will do the regular crawling for your website without any disruption. Google is offering sites a new way to choose with this change if they wish to. Users can choose Google crawling your website over the HTTP/2 by letting the server to respond with a 421 HTTP status code when Googlebot tries to crawl your website over h2. Google has addressed a few concerns about the HTTP/2 with some frequently asked questions.