This Ask Nile question is all about asking about how often should you submit your site to Google. That’s a pretty valid question, as not everyone understands how Google Search Console works. Usually, they just learn that they need to add their site to Google Search Console and submit a sitemap.
However, some people do that and then leave it.
How often should you submit your site to Google?
Okay, here’s the deal. If you’ve already submitted your sitemap to Google Search Console, you don’t have to re-submit your sitemap again. (Note: If you haven’t done any of this, I wrote an article on how to integrate Google Search Console into WordPress.) What you do, is occasionally ask Google to re-fetch, or also known as reindex your site.
Reasons why you should have Google reindex your site
You should only request a reindex when the following has occurred:
- You’ve re-designed your site and some structure and format has changed.
- Major large content adds (like you added a store, or a membership section, or portfolio section.)
- Your site was hacked and SERPs had Japanese or Chinese or odd characters in the title or description for your site.
- Your site navigation structure has changed. Like, you did a re-organizing of pages.
- After going through a major change in eliminating broken links or adding a lot of redirections.
1 You’ve re-designed your site and some structure and format has changed.
Sometimes when people re-design their website, some of the page’s change, and also the content. Some people re-design and focus more on specific areas of their site, in order to get people to click and visit those areas. Sometimes these new area or re-designed areas require some content to be built around it, so it’s important to get Google’s attention on the changes.
2Major large content adds (like you added a store, or a membership section, or portfolio section.)
As your site gets older, and you add new things to it, you may end up starting a store or membership section, or more. These sections require you to build content around them, in order to attract them into buying a membership or buying a product, or whatever you are providing.
3Your site was hacked and SERPs had Japanese or Chinese or odd characters in the title or description for your site.
Some hacks unfortunately leave weird title and page descriptions behind, whether it be drug or foreign characters. Additionally, some hacks on your site can trigger Google to label your search results as containing malware or hacks.
If this happens to you, then you will need to clean your infected site. Once your site is cleaned, you may need to tell Google that your site is clean, so they can take off the hacked label from your site’s search results. If you don’t have a security issue listed in your Google Search Console, you will want to have Google re-fetch your site, so those incorrect search results can fall off.
4Your site navigation structure has changed. Like, you did a re-organizing of pages.
If you’re adding new content, it means you’re adding more pages, and they have to be organized. It’s important to try to link those new pages somewhere on your site to help Google follow all the links and their relations within your website. For example, if you have a section about your services, and you just created a new type of service, you should add a little something to that main services page, so people can easily find it (and Google too.)
5After going through a major change in eliminating broken links or adding a lot of redirections.
As your site accumulates a lot of blog posts, pages, and other content, and your site gets older, you may start noticing that some sites that you mentioned in the past, no longer exist, or may have become a different website. Imagine having a 16+ year old site, like Blondish.net and all of the links I’ve probably mentioned. There have been quite a few links I’ve had to taken down. I’ve even taken down full articles about companies that provided services to bloggers, that no longer exist.
So, when this happens, it’s important to either removed the broken link, replace it and tweak your content with a different link, and then let Google know about it. Now, if you’re using WordPress, and the Broken link checker plugin, can help you discover what links are broken, so you can fix them. However, when you do change them, make sure to do as many as possible, and then ask Google Search Console to re-fetch your website. You don’t need to re-fetch every single time.
How to ask Google to reindex your site on Google Search Console
Now that I’ve explained some of the why, and how, and when, for those who are beginners, here’s how you can ask Google to reindex your site through Google Search Console.
1. Go to Google Search Console.
2. If you submitted your site and verified it in Google Search Console, you should see something like:
If you have multiple sites, there’s an area underneath the Google Search Console page title, on the top left corner. In the image, there’s a box, but you can click there with your mouse, and a dropdown menu will appear, so you can either select a new site, or if need be, add your site, if you haven’t done step one.
3. Add your site URL to the search box at the top, and hit the enter key. You’ll be sent to a page like:
4. On this page, you can test your URL and request your site to be reindex. Simply click the Submit Request. Google Search Console will run a test on the site, and then you can confirm to reindex.
That’s it. Only four steps.
Hope this helps! Have you submitted your site to Google Search Console? If so, have you ever used the reindex feature?
Great content Nile you did a great job. Actually, I want some information about resubmitting structure for my site on google and I found your article very useful. keep shairng
Interesting! I don’t think I’ve ever submitted my site. I had no idea.
Google is so important to any website’s success so these tips are very helpful. My site has not changed or been hacked so I will probably not re-submit it.
Oh glad to bump into this post. It’s really helpful and on the right time.
Thanks for sharing this Nile! This is blog is very informative & really helpful.
I will keep this in mind. I don’t think I need to since it hasn’t been hacked, thank goodness.
This post is really informative, thanks for sharing these tips.
Great article! Glad to know about all this stuff since I’m not so knowledgeable in it.
Lots of good information and helpful tips here for all the bloggers out there.
This is such a valuable information. I am going to keep this in mind as I will need this in the future.
This is helpful. I never knew much about submitting my site, I love these tips.
This is a good question. I was wondering about. Thanks for these details!
This has a lot of great information here. I need to look more in to this myself. I’m so glad that you share this with us.
Great information, I have never done it, so I might have to look into it
I wasn’t familiar with this information. It is useful to know what is best for a website.
This is really useful post, for those who are starting their site. I will share with my freind.
This is such a valuable info. I may need to resubmit my site that because I fixed some broken links and updated my content.
Re-submitting is necessary only in few very rare cases, but it is a good thing to know. Google Search Console is quite different from Bing Webmaster Tools, where it is recommended to submit new website and new URLs periodically.
Totally agree, John. I have just a few years of experience in this sphere and haven’t faced the necessity to resubmit pages yet. Anyway, it was interesting to read about it just in case.
Thank you for this wonderful blog with a good information
This is helpful. I try your method and it Indexed my site it 100% working!!! Thanks for sharing the nice post.
Hi Nile,
A very-very important point you have discussed in this post. It’s an important point to consider for the optimization of a website in search engines.
Thank you
Awh wow I didn’t realise I had to resubmit.. I thought this only had to be done once. Thank you so much, this has been an eye opener 🙂
Very helpful information, thanks for putting out time to share this.
Now, I know how to ask google to re-index my site anytime I make new changes.
Let me head over to Google search console, thanks.
Thank you so much for sharing this information. I used to think you just create and let Google do its thing. This has been eye-opening. Thank you
Hi Neil,
It was a very insightful article! As a marketer and startup owner, I am always confused about this, and you not only acknowledged this problem but provided a great solution as well. I think I was submitting my site to Google inconsistently, and it somehow affected my rankings. I have optimized a lot of aspects of my website, and I think this is the perfect time to submit my site. Thanks a lot for sharing this resource, it was a very insightful read!
Excellent post, I was wondering why my traffic to website has been dropping over the last few months. I’ve bookmarked this page and will return frequently to read more on this great blog! Keep up the good work.
Value-packed information here! Quite a few people tend to be confused about this particular topic so this article would definitely help them out. Thanks for sharing this Neil!