Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted that news related sites, such as this one, may have noticed a drop in the crawl statistics within Google Webmaster Tools.
If you did notice that drop, Matt says you do not need to worry.
Google News added if-modified-since support in March, which would be the
reason for the crawl changes. Matt added that “Google News doing
smarter crawling now” and thus being more efficient.I’ve checked the crawl stats for iblwebsolutions.com, a Google News publisher, and indeed, the crawl stats have declined significantly in March 2014: