The world of web is really picking up in terms of speed. Apparently, the masterminds behind search engines are scrambling to significantly reduce search engine response time with respect to searches. In this fast paced environment, it is always ideal to have any changes to your website, crawled and indexed by search engines, especially Google, at greater speeds.
Google fetches updated pages on the web and adds them to the respective index via the process called crawling. The program designed to perform crawling: Googlebot, crawls through millions of web pages in a single day. Under such a circumstance, there are some handy tips that can be used to make your website indexed by Google a bit faster.
Create Sitemap: There are two types of Sitemaps HTML and XML sitemap, while the HTML sitemap is placed on the website and meant for the users, the latter one is crafted for the search engine crawlers like Googlebot. It is imperative for both these sitemap to list all the pages on the website and to be updated on a regular basis with any changes made to the website URL or content structure. Googlebot prioritizes its crawling process by performing an initial search for XML sitemap. Hence, by crafting an XML sitemap, you can make sure that the Googlebot finds everything listed in a single file rather than carrying out the task of crawling and indexing each page on the site, which can be time consuming. One of the other advantages of creating an XML sitemap is that you can submit these sitemap directly to the Google Search Console to notify Google about any site content/URL structure change or update.
In cases where you have just updated a single page in the website, you can consider notifying Google about the change and to initiate a crawl by using the “Fetch as Google” option in the Google Search Console.
Login to Search Console and follow the respective path: “Crawl->Fetch as Google” to submit the page that you just edited or posted.
Leverage the power of social media: Posting newly added content via social media is an ideal strategy to initiate a Googlebot crawl. The more clicks, shares and comments that you procure for the newly added post, the quicker it will be crawled.
Bookmarking or content directory submissions: bookmarking your updated website via sites like Delicious and StumbledUpon and directories like Blogdig, Bloghub (in case of blog updates) is also an ideal strategy to get your content indexed faster by Googlebot.
Pro Tip: Google Search Console provides the provision of controlling the crawl rate of your website. By default, the setting will be set to the option “Let Google determine my crawl rate”, however, you have the option to switch it to the “Set custom crawl rate” and adjust the crawl rate as needed.
Getting your website indexed quickly on search engine can be an added advantage, provided, the updates are quality ridden and abides by search engine etiquettes. The strategy will help you to outsmart similar content or structure updates that you can expect from your competitors. The fact that the latest search engine algorithm update: Google Penguin 4.0 is deemed real-time algorithm is also something that can be considered as a boon when it comes to getting your website indexed by Google in a jiffy.