Google: You Can't Force GoogleBot To Crawl You Over HTTP/2

Nov 24, 2020 - 7:51 am 0 — by

Googlebot

As you know, Google began crawling some sites over HTTP/2 this month. While you can opt out of this, i.e. GoogleBot crawling your site over HTTP/2, you cannot opt in to it, at least not now.

John Mueller of Google said on Twitter "we don't manually pick sites for trials like that, it's more about whether it's possible & makes sense for crawling."

He also added that there is no ranking boost for being crawled over HTTP/2 - but we knew that.

Here are those tweets:

In the short term, if you do not want Google crawling your site over HTTP/2, here is how to opt out. To opt out from crawling over HTTP/2, instruct the server that's hosting your site to respond with a 421 HTTP status code when Googlebot attempts to crawl your site over HTTP/2. If that's not feasible, you can send a message to the Googlebot team (however this solution is temporary).

And no, you cannot use that form to opt in.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Google Search Volatility

More Details

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Bing Search

Bing Product Results With Recommended By Section

Oct 2, 2026 - 7:31 am
Google Ads

Google Ads Sponsored Products Results Missing Images

Oct 2, 2026 - 7:21 am
Google Ads

Google Ads Sitelinks Format In AI Mode

Oct 2, 2026 - 7:11 am
Google Ads

Google Ads To Allow Some Advertisers To Use Different Business Names

Oct 2, 2026 - 7:05 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google Helpful Content Doc With New Main Content & EOT/SA Sections

Oct 2, 2026 - 6:00 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google: Manually Factcheck & Review AI-Generated Content For Accuracy

Oct 1, 2026 - 8:10 pm
Previous Story: Google Featured Snippets With Data Overlay Links To Other Sites