Google released a video on what to do to get Google to automatically re-index an entire website. The answer to the question assumed that the context was a major change to an entire website, which required a full crawl to speed up Google’s index update.
The person who asked the question wanted to know if there is a way to enable a site-wide crawl.
Google’s John Mueller narrated the question:
“Today’s question is whether there is a mechanism to request the re-indexing of an entire website at once.”
Mueller responded:
“Unfortunately no. There is currently no way to enable recrawling and reprocessing of an entire website at once.
When you make major changes to a website, search engines will generally automatically update them over time. There’s nothing extra you need to do.”
Mueller then outlined additional things that someone needing reindexing would need to do.
The main points he covered are:
1. Use 301 response codes to alert search engines that a web page has moved so that the new pages are discovered.
2. Use 404 server response codes to tell search engines that a page no longer exists.
3. Google tends to give high priority to crawling important pages of a website such as the home page, which means that linking key pages from important pages is a good strategy.
4. Important changes such as new phone numbers (and probably street addresses) should ideally be noted on the most important pages of a website.
301 server response codes
Of course, it is essential to add a 301 redirect when the URL of a web page changes. The server’s response informs search engines that a page has been permanently moved to a new URL which will encourage the search engine to find the new web page for indexing.
If the web page is completely the same and only the URL has changed, this should have no effect on rankings, except for a few days of transition as the index replaces the old URL with the new one.
But if the content of the web pages has also changed, there is a chance that this could trigger a reassessment of the site’s quality, a process that may take longer than you may be comfortable with.
John Mueller discussed in another video from 2021 what happens after major changes to a website:
“The only time we have to 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 changes all the internal links, where maybe it moves 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 have to rethink all this.
But that’s also not something that’s triggered by anything specific, it’s just that a lot of things have changed on the site, and even to keep up, we have to make a lot of incremental changes to reassess it.
Watch the #AskGooglebot video with Google’s John Mueller:
Can my entire site be re-indexed at my request?
Featured image by Shutterstock/Vectorium
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