Made Significant Updates to Your Website? Force Google to Recrawl It

Once you submit a URL to index, Google recrawls your site within a day.

Google has managed to keep webmasters and SEO professionals on their toes over the last couple of years with updates to the company’s search algorithms — like Panda and Penguin — as well as with the promulgation of several bullet points to help websites rank higher on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Some of the quality bullet points indicated by Google call for a major website overhaul, but they are worth the effort. These include changing the sitemap, radical layout modifications, elimination of duplicate content, switching to canonical tags, etc. Google’s search engine crawlers will eventually visit the site and learn about the changes, but that could take longer than expected, and in the meantime, the SERP ranking of a website is bound to take a hit and the number of visitors may significantly decrease. This can be particularly detrimental to law firms that attract online clients.

Whenever SEO professionals made significant website changes in the past, they resubmitted their XML sitemaps or increased social media bookmarking activity to prompt Google’s crawlers to immediately visit the site. Such strategies these days are not likely to work, which is why Google has implemented “Submit URL to Index,” a new feature of its Webmaster Tools.

Here’s how the new URL submission tool works: Workers compensation attorneys in Florida, for example, may want to create and feature new content with regard to the proposed 6.1 percent rate increase by insurance companies. Once that content is published, webmasters or content managers can log in to Webmasters Tools and input the URL where the relevant content is located by using the “Fetch as Googlebot” feature.

Once Google sends confirmation of a successfully fetched URL, the option to submit the new page becomes available. Google will crawl and index the new content within a day, and people searching for information about the proposed changes may see specialized law firms listed at the top of the SERP.