Is it dangerous to use "Fetch as Google" too much in Webmaster Tools?
-
I saw some people freaking out about this on some forums and thought I would ask.
Are you aware of there being any downside to use "Fetch as Google" often? Is it a bad thing to do when you create a new page or blog post, for example?
-
Hi Keri
I did yes, i stumbled upon it and thought i'd give my two pennies worth as an SEO!
Certainly wasnt looking for a backlink as it would be pretty irrelevant for our industry and would never expect a dofollow links from a comments section anyway.
Thanks to you also for your feedback
Cheers!
-
Welcome, LoveSavings. Just wanted to make sure you knew this post is a year old, and that all of the links in Q&A are automatically nofollowed. Thanks for the thoughtful answer!
-
Having done lots of tests on this, i would say that fetching as google is the best wat forward.
Although the steps listed above are all excellent ways of boosting the speed at which google will index your page, none of them seem to be as effective as fetching in webmaster tools. you can a few hundred of these a month, so you shouldnt run out unless you are publishing immense amounts of content - in which case google is likely to be indexing your content very quickly anyway.
www.loveenergysavings.com is still relatively small although we publish excellent, though leadership style content. so, to ensure that our posts are indexed as quickly as possible (as we are competing with some massive sites) we always fetch our posts in google webmaster tools. this is always quicker than tweeting, google+ etc. we also have an xml sitemap which automatically adds our post, this doesnt guarantee rapid indexing though.
having messed around with all of these methods, fetching as g-bot is always the quickest and most effective option. as danatanseo says, its there to be utilised by seo's so why not take full advantage? i can't see why google would ever look unfavourably on a site for wanting its content to be available to the public as quickly as possible?
-
I would say it is not a preferred way to alert Google when you have a new page and it is pretty limited. What is better, and frankly more effective is to do things like:
- add the page to your XML sitemap (make sure sitemap is submitted to Google)
- add the page to your RSS feeds (make sure your RSS is submitted to Google)
- add a link to the page on your home page or other "important" page on your site
- tweet about your new page
- status update in FB about your new page
- Google Plus your new page
- Feature your new page in your email newsletter
Obviously, depending on the page you may not be able to do all of these, but normally, Google will pick up new pages in your sitemap. I find that G hits my sitemaps almost daily (your mileage may vary).
I only use fetch if I am trying to diagnose a problem on a specific page and even then, I may just fetch but not submit. I have only submitted when there was some major issue with a page that I could not wait for Google to update as a part of its regular crawl of my site. As an example, we had a release go out with a new section and that section was blocked by our robots.txt. I went ahead and submitted the robots.txt to encourage Google to update the page sooner so that our new section would be :"live" to Google sooner as G does not hit our robots.txt as often. Otherwise for 99.5% of my other pages on sites, the options above work well.
The other thing is that you get very few fetches a month, so you are still very limited in what you can do. Your sitemaps can include thousands of pages each. Google fetch is limited, so another reason I reserve it for my time sensitive emergencies.
-
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/158587?hl=en#158587
I just double-checked David, and it looks like the allocation may not be different for different sites. According to Google you get 500 fetches and 10 URL + Linked pages submissions every week.
-
You are welcome David, and no this isn't a lifetime limit at all. I believe it resets at least once every 30 days, maybe more often than that. I manage four different sites, some large, some small and I've never run out of fetches yet.
-
Thanks Dana. Is it possible to get more fetches? Presumably it's not a lifetime limit, right?
-
No, I wouldn't worry about this at all. This is why Google has already allocated a finite number of "Fetches" and URL + Links submissions to your account. These numbers are based on the size of your site. Larger sites are allocated more and smaller sites less. [Please see my revised statement below regarding Google's "Fetch" limits - it isn't based on site size] I don't think enough Webmasters take advantage of the Fetch as often as they should.
Hope that helps!
Dana
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Using rel="nofollow" when link has an exact match anchor but the link does add value for the user
Hi all, I am wondering what peoples thoughts are on using rel="nofollow" for a link on a page like this http://askgramps.org/9203/a-bushel-of-wheat-great-value-than-bushel-of-goldThe anchor text is "Brigham Young" and the page it's pointing to's title is Brigham Young and it goes into more detail on who he is. So it is exact match. And as we know if this page has too much exact match anchor text it is likely to be considered "over-optimized". I guess one of my questions is how much is too much exact match or partial match anchor text? I have heard ratios tossed around like for every 10 links; 7 of them should not be targeted at all while 3 out of the 10 would be okay. I know it's all about being natural and creating value but using exact match or partial match anchors can definitely create value as they are almost always highly relevant. One reason that prompted my question is I have heard that this is something Penguin 3.0 is really going look at.On the example URL I gave I want to keep that particular link as is because I think it does add value to the user experience but then I used rel="nofollow" so it doesn't pass PageRank. Anyone see a problem with doing this and/or have a different idea? An important detail is that both sites are owned by the same organization. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThridHour0 -
Webmaster tools 404
Hey, I'm getting a soft 404 error on a webpage that has content and is deferentially not a 404. We've redirect a load of urls to the web page. The url has parameters which was used before the redirect but are no longer used on by the new url, these parameters have been carried over in the redirect. Is this whats causing the soft 404 error or is there another problem that may need addressing? Also a canonical has been set on the webpage. Thanks, Luke.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoisyLittleMonkey1 -
Pipe ("|") in my website's title is being replaced with ":" in Google results
Hi , One of the websites I'm promoting and working on is www.pau-brasil.co.il.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kadel
It's wordpress-based website and as you can see the html's Title is "PauBrasil | some hebrew slogan".
(Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/2f80EEY.gif)
When I'm searching for "PauBrasil" (Which is the brand's name) , one of the results google shows is "PauBrasil: Some Hebrew Slogan" (Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/eJxNHrO.gif ) Why does the pipe is being replaced with ":" ?
And not just that , as you can see there's a "blank space" missing between the the ":" to the slogan.
(note: the websites has been indexed by google crawler at least 4 times so I find it hard to believe it can be the reason) I've keep on looking and found out that there's another page in that website with the exact same title
but when I'm looking for it in google , it shows the title as it really is , with pipe. ("|").
(Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/dtsbZV2.gif) Have you ever encountered something like that?
Can it be that the duplicated title cause that weird "replacement"? Thanks in advance,
Kadel0 -
What counts as a "deeper level" in SEO?
Hi, I am trying to make our site more crawlable and get link juice to the "bottom pages" in an ecommerce site. Currently, our site has a big mega menu - and we have: Home > CAT 1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
SUBCAT 1
SUBSUBCAT 1
PRODUCT Our URL Structure looks:
www.domain.com/cat1/subcat1/subsubcat1/ and here are the links to the products but the URL's look like: www.domain.com/product.html Obviously the ideal thing would be to cut out one of the CATEGORIES. But I may be unable to do that in the short term - so I was wondering if by taking CAT1 out of the equation - e.g., just make it a static item that allows the drop down menu to work, but no page for it - Does that cut out a level? Thanks, Ben0 -
Rankings dropped off a cliff. Webmaster tools message: No manual spam actions found. Now what?
A week ago my rankings for http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com (some adult content) dropped and I'm now getting now impressions. I submitted a reconsideration request as I was sure I hadn't violated any rules and today the reply was that no manual spam actions were found. Te email goes onto say there are a variety of other things that could affect rankings such as site architecture, not being able to crawl and algo changes. As far as I'm aware all these issues are fine. I'm not aware of any algo updates last weekend. my question is what can I do now? I need to get my rankings back but there's nothing wrong with my site or practices.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Fluctuating Rankings on "difficult" keywords
Hi guys, I have a client who wants to rank well for two very "difficult" keywords and eight easier ones. The easy ones are "treadmills + city" and the difficult ones are "treadmills" and "treadmill". We have got great traction on the "+city" keywords and he now ranks on page one for all those. However, we have noticed that although he ranks on page 2-3 for "treadmill" treadmills", those rankings fluctuate widely day to day. Rankings for the "+city" versions are stable, a rising slowly as I would expect. Rankings for the difficult keywords can be 235 one day, 32 the next week, 218 the day after that, then stable at 30ish for a week, then fluctuation again. I know Google update every day, but what are the likely causes of the easier keywords being stable, while the harder ones fluctuate? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevedeane0 -
Should i remove sitemap from the mainsite at a webshop (footer link) and only submit .XML in Webmaster tools?
Case: Webshop with over 2000 products. I want to make a logical sitemap for Google to follow. What is best practice at this field? Should i remove the on-page sitemap there is in html with links (is shown as a footer link called "sitemap") and only have the domain.com/sitemap.xml ? Links for great articles about making sitemaps are appreciated to. The system is Magento, if that changes anything.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mickelp0 -
HELP - got the following message - Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links
Hi All, While trying to grow we used several freelancers and small companies for guest blogging, article submissions etc. We lost about 90% of traffic from our peek at December. We don't know if it is related but we got the following message last week:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
"Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to www.domain.com" Is it related (getting this message after two months of losing traffic)? What to do???? (P.S
We fired most of the companies we used months ago since we noticed they used bad methods. We didn't believe it can hurt us - just thought it would be useless...) Please Help...0