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
-
I have implemented rel = "next" and rel = "prev" but google console is picking up pages as being duplicate. Can anyone tell me what is going on?
I have implemented rel="next" and rel = "prev" across our site but google console is picking it up as duplications. Also individual pages show up in search result too. Here is an example linkhttp://www.empowher.com/mental-health/content/sizeismweightism-how-cope-it-and-how-it-affects-mental-healthhttp://www.empowher.com/mental-health/content/sizeismweightism-how-cope-it-and-how-it-affects-mental-health?page=0,3The second link shows up as duplicate. What can i do to fix this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | akih0 -
Hreflang="x-default"
Hello all This is my first question in the Moz Forum, hope I will get some concrete answers 🙂 I am looking for some suggestions on implementing the hreflang="x-default" properly in our site. Any previous experience or a link to a specific resource/ example will be very helpful. I have found many examples on implementing the homepage hreflang, however nothing on non-homepage urls within your site. The below will be the code for the "Homepage" for /uk/. Here /en-INT/ is a Global English site not targeted for any country unlike en-MY, en-SG, en-AU etc. Is this the correct approach? Now, in case of non homepage urls, should the respective en-INT url be "x-default" or the "x-default" shouldn't exist altogether? For example, will the below be the correct coding? Many thanks Avi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Delonghi_Group0 -
HELP! How does one prevent regional pages as being counted as "duplicate content," "duplicate meta descriptions," et cetera...?
The organization I am working with has multiple versions of its website geared towards the different regions. US - http://www.orionhealth.com/ CA - http://www.orionhealth.com/ca/ DE - http://www.orionhealth.com/de/ UK - http://www.orionhealth.com/uk/ AU - http://www.orionhealth.com/au/ NZ - http://www.orionhealth.com/nz/ Some of these sites have very similar pages which are registering as duplicate content, meta descriptions and titles. Two examples are: http://www.orionhealth.com/terms-and-conditions http://www.orionhealth.com/uk/terms-and-conditions Now even though the content is the same, the navigation is different since each region has different product options / services, so a redirect won't work since the navigation on the main US site is different from the navigation for the UK site. A rel=canonical seems like a viable option, but (correct me if I'm wrong) it tells search engines to only index the main page, in this case, it would be the US version, but I still want the UK site to appear to search engines. So what is the proper way of treating similar pages accross different regional directories? Any insight would be GREATLY appreciated! Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scratch_MM0 -
What is the difference between link rel="canonical" and meta name="canonical"?
Hi mozzers, I would like to know What is the difference between link rel="canonical" and meta name="canonical"? and is it dangerous to have both of these elements combined together? One of my client's page has the these two elements and kind of bothers me because I only know link rel="canonical" to be relevant to remove duplicates. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
How would you handle 12,000 "tag" pages on Wordpress site?
We have a Wordpress site where /tag/ pages were not set to "noindex" and they are driving 25% of site's traffic (roughly 100,000 visits year to date). We can't simply "noindex" them all now, or we'll lose a massive amount of traffic. We can't possibly write unique descriptions for all of them. We can't just do nothing or a Panda update will come by and ding us for duplicate content one day (surprised it hasn't already). What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak1 -
Google bot vs google mobile bot
Hi everyone 🙂 I seriously hope you can come up with an idea to a solution for the problem below, cause I am kinda stuck 😕 Situation: A client of mine has a webshop located on a hosted server. The shop is made in a closed CMS, meaning that I have very limited options for changing the code. Limited access to pagehead and can within the CMS only use JavaScript and HTML. The only place I have access to a server-side language is in the root where a Defualt.asp file redirects the visitor to a specific folder where the webshop is located. The webshop have 2 "languages"/store views. One for normal browsers and google-bot and one for mobile browsers and google-mobile-bot.In the default.asp (asp classic). I do a test for user agent and redirect the user to one domain or the mobile, sub-domain. All good right? unfortunately not. Now we arrive at the core of the problem. Since the mobile shop was added on a later date, Google already had most of the pages from the shop in it's index. and apparently uses them as entrance pages to crawl the site with the mobile bot. Hence it never sees the default.asp (or outright ignores it).. and this causes as you might have guessed a huge pile of "Dub-content" Normally you would just place some user-agent detection in the page head and either throw Google a 301 or a rel-canon. But since I only have access to JavaScript and html in the page head, this cannot be done. I'm kinda running out of options quickly, so if anyone has an idea as to how the BEEP! I get Google to index the right domains for the right devices, please feel free to comment. 🙂 Any and all ideas are more then welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReneReinholdt0 -
If google ignores links from "spammy" link directories ...
Then why does SEO moz have this list: http://www.seomoz.org/dp/seo-directory ?? Included in that list are some pretty spammy looking sites such as: <colgroup><col width="345"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg
| http://www.site-sift.com/ |
| http://www.2yi.net/ |
| http://www.sevenseek.com/ |
| http://greenstalk.com/ |
| http://anthonyparsons.com/ |
| http://www.rakcha.com/ |
| http://www.goguides.org/ |
| http://gosearchbusiness.com/ |
| http://funender.com/free_link_directory/ |
| http://www.joeant.com/ |
| http://www.browse8.com/ |
| http://linkopedia.com/ |
| http://kwika.org/ |
| http://tygo.com/ |
| http://netzoning.com/ |
| http://goongee.com/ |
| http://bigall.com/ |
| http://www.incrawler.com/ |
| http://rubberstamped.org/ |
| http://lookforth.com/ |
| http://worldsiteindex.com/ |
| http://linksgiving.com/ |
| http://azoos.com/ |
| http://www.uncoverthenet.com/ |
| http://ewilla.com/ |0 -
How permanent is a rel="canonical"?
We are rolling out our canonicals now, and we were wondering: what happens if we decide we did this wrong and need to change where canonicals point? In other words, how bad of a thing is it to have a canonical tag point to page a for a while, then change it to point to page b? I'm just curious to see how permanent of a decision we are making, and how bad it will be if we screwed up and need to change later. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CoreyTisdale0