Google recently released a video addressing how to prompt an automatic re-indexing of an entire website. The response focused on situations involving significant changes to the website, requiring a comprehensive crawl to swiftly update Google’s index.
The person asking the question sought information on initiating a complete recrawl of the entire site.
Google’s John Mueller narrated the question:
“Today’s question is whether there’s a mechanism to request re-indexing of a whole website at once.”
Mueller answered:
“Unfortunately, no. There is currently no way to trigger a recrawl and reprocessing of a whole website all at once.
When you make major changes on a website, search engines will generally update those automatically over time. There’s nothing additional that you have to do.”
Mueller next outlined additional things that someone needing a re-indexing should do.
He highlighted following key strategies:
- Employ 301 response codes for page moves, ensuring search engines find the new location.
- Signal page removal with 404 server response codes.
- Prioritize linking crucial pages from high-importance ones, optimizing Google’s crawl.
- Update vital info like phone numbers on significant pages for effective website management.
301 Server Response Codes
Implementing a 301 redirect is crucial when altering a webpage’s URL. This server response signals search engines about the permanent relocation of the page to a new URL, prompting the search engine to locate and index the updated webpage.
If the content remains unchanged and only the URL is modified, it typically has no impact on rankings, aside from a brief transition period as the index switches from the old URL to the new one.
However, when the content on webpages undergoes modifications, there’s a chance it could initiate a reassessment of site quality. This process might extend beyond the expected timeframe, causing some discomfort.
John Mueller commented in another video from 2021 on what happens after a major website changes:
“The one time where we do have to kind of reconsider how the site works is if the site does a serious restructuring of its website where it changes a lot of the URLs and all of the internal links change, where maybe you move from one CMS to another CMS and everything changes and looks different.
Then from a quality point of view or from a technical point of view, we can’t just keep the old understanding of the site, of the pages, because everything is different now.
So we kind of have to rethink all of that.
But that’s also not something that is triggered by anything specific but rather it’s just well lots of things have changed on the site and even to kind of incrementally keep up we have to do a lot of incremental changes to re-evaluate that.”
Watch the #AskGooglebot video with Google’s John Mueller:
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