What “Recrawling” Means for You
When you make a change to your website like fixing a typo, updating content, or adding a new page you want a search engine to see it as soon as possible. But a search engine’s bots are on their own schedule. They crawl and re-crawl your website when they decide to, and you don’t have a lot of control over that. This is where you can take matters into your own hands.
Asking a search engine to recrawl your URLs means you’re requesting it to revisit your pages sooner than its normal schedule. This can help a new page get indexed faster, or it can help a search engine see an important update you made to an old page.
Why Would You Want Google to Recrawl?
There are several situations where asking a search engine to recrawl your URLs is helpful:
- Updated Content: If you’ve added new information, optimized keywords, or rewritten content.
- Fixed Errors: After solving issues like 404 errors, broken links, or indexing problems.
- New Pages: For fresh blog posts, landing pages, or products.
- Changed Site Structure: If you’ve updated menus, categories, or internal links.
- Technical Fixes: For changes in
robots.txt, canonical tags, or redirects.
How to Ask Google to Recrawl Your URLs
You have a few different options for asking a search engine to recrawl your URLs. The method you choose depends on whether you have a single URL or an entire website.
1. Recrawl a Single URL with Search Console
The easiest way to ask Google to recrawl a single URL is with your search console account.
- Inspect the URL: The first thing you should do is to inspect the URL in your search console account. This will tell you if the page has been indexed and if there are any issues.
- Request Indexing: If the page is not indexed, or if you have made a change to it, you can click on the Request Indexing button. This tells a search engine that you want it to recrawl the page.
2. Recrawl an Entire Site with a Sitemap
If you have many updated URLs, it’s better to submit your sitemap. A sitemap is a road map of your website for a search engine. It lists all the important pages on your site that you want to be indexed.
- Submit a sitemap: The best way to tell a search engine about all the pages on your site is to submit a sitemap. When you submit a sitemap, a search engine’s bots will be prompted to crawl your site.
3. Boost Discovery with Internal Links
A search engine often discovers updated pages faster if they’re linked from your homepage or other important pages. Adding internal links to your updated page helps a search engine’s bots find it naturally. Our platform, Clickrank, can help with this. The platform automatically crawls your website and provides a prioritized list of optimizations. This allows you to focus on high-level strategy while the platform takes care of the operational heavy lifting.
Best Practices for Recrawling
- Don’t overuse the Request Indexing feature use it only for important updates.
- Always check that your page is crawlable (not blocked by
robots.txt). - Make sure your content adds real value; recrawling won’t help thin or duplicate content.
- Keep your sitemap updated for smoother crawling.
