Submitting A Request To Google To First Crawl Or Re-Crawl Your Page

Google’s recrawling process in a nutshell

For each website in its index, Google has a particular crawling schedule that determines what URLs to recheck and how often to do so. Examples of important variables that influence this schedule are:

• the quality of the platform the website is hosted on
• the website’s authority,
• the number of pages,
• the freshness of its content.

For instance, a website that only gets updated a few times per month will be recrawled more slowly than one that receives daily updates.

To speed up the whole recrawling process, you can take the following steps:

1. Request indexing of URLs through Google Search Console
2. Add a sitemap to Google Search Console
3. Add relevant internal links
4. Gain backlinks to updated content

How to ask Google to recrawl your URLs

If you’ve recently added or made changes to a page on your site, you can request that Google re-index your page using any of the methods listed here. You can’t request indexing for URLs that you don’t manage.

General guidelines

• Crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Be patient and monitor progress using either the Index Status report or the URL Inspection tool.
• All methods described here have about the same response time.
• There is a quota for submitting individual URLs.
• Requesting a recrawl multiple times for the same URL or sitemap won’t get it crawled any faster.

 

Crawl request methods

Use the URL Inspection tool (just a few URLs)

Use the URL Inspection tool to request a crawl of individual URLs. Note that if you have large numbers of URLs, submit a sitemap instead.

To submit a URL to the index:

1. Follow the general guidelines.
2. Inspect the URL using the URL Inspection tool.
3. Select Request indexing. The tool will run a live test on the URL to see whether it has any obvious indexing issues, and if not, the page will be queued for indexing. If the tool finds issues with the page, try to fix them.

Submit a sitemap (many URLs at once)

A sitemap is an important way for Google to discover URLs on your site. A sitemap can also include additional metadata about alternate language versions, video, image, or news-specific pages.