How long does it take until Google re-indexes a site?

In Google’s latest Q&A, he answers a question from a page owner concerned about their site needing to be crawled more often.

How often does Google re-index a website?

John explains that crawling an entire website at once is counterproductive because, depending on the server and its size, it can cause unnecessary server load. That is why Google imposes a daily page limit depending on the server specifications (although they have not mentioned the exact page limit).

Since Googlebot can only crawl part of the web page, it is customary to prioritize some pages over others. That is why it is normal for pages such as the home page and category pages (at a high level of the structure) to be crawled more frequently.

It is expected, then, that changes on these pages are reflected more quickly than in any old blog entry that you have on your website (in some cases, if specific entries are old and are no longer bringing traffic, it is advisable to do something with them to optimize Googlebot’s crawling time).

Given this information, patience is key when waiting for changes on other pages to be reflected in Google Search. Although… is there a way to do it manually?

What can I do to force Google to re-index my page faster?

There is an option, provided by Google itself, to force Googlebot to go through the page that we tell it to for quick indexing. In some cases, it is advisable to do so, such as when creating a new entry, thus preventing someone from copying your content and indexing it before you (here, you would be creating duplicate content, which case is penalized!).

There are two ways to do it:

• From: Verify ownership of your website using one of the different ways Google offers and then go to Crawl -> Explore as Google. There, you can insert the URL you want to index quickly.
• From: To do this option, like the previous one, you must have a Google account. We can send URLs from this option, not ours (if that benefits you). It’s as easy as inserting the website address that we want it to track, and that’s it.

Another day, we will talk about how to control Googlebot and see what pages it crawls using external tools.