You’ve probably heard about Google Webmaster Tools and you may have created an account, but we bet you’ve never really paid any attention to it. Right? Truth is, there’s a lot of valuable information and tools available through the system. One particularly useful tool that we are going to focus on is, ‘Fetch as Google’.
‘Fetch as Google’ helps to speed up the index process of your new content by allowing you to manually submit the links to Google. Usually, the index process can take days, even weeks in some cases and by the time your new blog or article has been indexed, it’s already old news.
It’s a really simple tool to use, making it easy to implement into your content creation strategy. Here’s how it works:
- Login to Google Webmaster Tools (if you haven’t verified your website with Google Webmaster Tools, then go do this now!), then click on the website name
- Select ‘Crawl’ from the left-hand navigation to expand out the options and click on ‘Fetch as Google’
- Enter the URL of the page you’d like to submit (ever after the /) and click ‘FETCH’
- You’ll then see your submitted link in the list below
The ‘Status’ will let you know if it has been successful or if there was a problem. You can also see the date and time you submitted this. Google states that they aim to process all requests via ‘Fetch as Google’ within one day, but usually, it goes through within minutes.
If you see the ‘Not found’ error, then this usually indicates that the URL you submitted is incorrect. Double-check this and try again - Once the status updates to ‘Success’, you’ll see the ‘Submit to index’ button appear, click this
- You’ll then be asked if you’d like to:
Crawl only this URL – this means only the URL you entered will be crawled and indexed
Crawl this URL and its direct links – this will crawl the URL entered and all other pages linked from this page, via a navigation or embedded links etc. - Unless you’ve made significant changes to a lot of the content on your website, select ‘Crawl only this URL’ and click Go
- A message will then appear to confirm the URL was submitted to the index
- You’re finished! Remember that you can submit up to 500 URLs per week for your site, or you can submit the URL and all pages linked from it up to 10 times. You’ll only need to use the latter if your website has changed significantly.