<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The person who asked the question wanted to know if there is a way to enable a site-wide crawl.<\/p>\n
Google’s John Mueller narrated the question:<\/strong><\/p>\n “Today’s question is whether there is a mechanism to request the re-indexing of an entire website at once.”<\/p>\n Mueller responded:<\/strong><\/p>\n “Unfortunately no. There is currently no way to enable recrawling and reprocessing of an entire website at once.<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n Mueller then outlined additional things that someone needing reindexing would need to do.<\/p>\n The main points he covered are:<\/strong><\/p>\n 1. Use 301 response codes to alert search engines that a web page has moved so that the new pages are discovered.<\/p>\n 2. Use 404 server response codes to tell search engines that a page no longer exists.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 4. Important changes such as new phone numbers (and probably street addresses) should ideally be noted on the most important pages of a website.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n John Mueller discussed in another video from 2021 what happens after major changes to a website:<\/strong><\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n So we have to rethink all this.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Watch the #AskGooglebot video with Google’s John Mueller:<\/strong><\/p>\n301 server response codes<\/h2>\n
Can my entire site be re-indexed at my request?<\/h3>\n