In a Webmaster Hangout, Google’s John Mueller made comments discouraging the use of Google Search Console’s URL Submit Tool. He also shared insights on how Google indexes websites and suggested various methods to ensure new content is properly crawled and indexed quickly.
URL Submit Tool Not Generally Needed
There are many discussions on social media and forums about Google not indexing websites. The URL Submit Tool is a convenient way for publishers to ensure new content is indexed, but it’s not necessary.
Here’s what Google’s John Mueller said:
"In general for most websites you shouldn’t need to use this tool at all.
…There should be no need for you as a normal webmaster to submit any individual URLs for kind of the normal day-to-day sites, like through the search console through the submit URL tool."
It’s Probably Your Fault if Content is Not Indexed
Mueller addressed the common situation of Google not picking up content as quickly as a publisher wants. He pointed to the publishers as the cause of this issue. In other words, if Google is not indexing your content, it’s likely the publisher’s responsibility to diagnose the reason.
Mueller offered these suggestions for identifying what may be causing Google to not index content and provided solutions to ensure indexing:
"If you’re seeing that we’re not picking up new content as quickly as we could, I would make sure that you’re linking to it from a visible place on your website and also maybe putting it in maybe a site map file or RSS feed or anything like that."
Best Time to Use Google URL Submit Tool
Mueller clarified that the URL submit tool is generally not needed. However, he elaborated on scenarios where it might be necessary, specifically in emergency situations where time is critical.
Mueller mentioned several emergency scenarios but notably omitted the situation of a hacked website that has been cleaned up. Recovering from a hack is a pressing emergency since hackers can add spammy links and content to web pages, and publishers would want Google to quickly crawl the disinfected pages and index the normalized content.
John Mueller explained the recommended use of Google’s URL Submit Tool:
"…The one time I would recommend using the submit URL tool is when you have real issues on your website that you urgently need to fix and you urgently need to have Google reflect that in the search results.
So, for example, you removed something private that you accidentally published. That would be a good candidate for this tool. Maybe you had a wrong phone number in your search results and people were calling someone else by mistake. That would be something you’d want to get reindexed and processed as quickly as possible."
Takeaways – How to Get New Content Indexed Fast
- Link to new content from a prominent web page on your website.
- Add a reference to a new page in your site map.
- Ensure new content is shown in an RSS feed and that the RSS feed is accessible and not blocked from crawlers.
You can watch the video of John Mueller discussing how to get content indexed for further insights.
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