Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Google Indexing Request - Typical Time to Complete?
-
In Google Search Console, when you request the (re) indexing of a fetched page, what's the average amount of time it takes to re-index and does it vary that much from site to site or are manual re-index request put in a queue and served on a first come - first serve basis despite the site characteristics like domain/page authority?
-
I want to be clear that I'm not referring to a re-crawl, but a re-index. Now I realize there are a gazillion ranking signals and most of the stronger signals are probably not on-page signals (although page title, headers, and anchor text combined is probably a relatively strong signal) so that for most situations, on-page changes are going to like move you from the middle of page 2 to top 3 (except for obscure - low competition long tail keywords of course.)
So is there a delay between re-crawl and re-rank (I'll use that term instead of re-index). I also realize the rank can change based on changes on the other sites in the SERPS. I suppose the re-rank delay could be verified by taking a 'sacrificial' page and totally changing the title, headings, and other on-page items to a completed different keyword theme and see how long it takes for the rank to go down for the previous keyword theme and up for the new theme.
I would think Google would quite possibly add a delay, even a random delay length, to discourage people from constantly requesting re-indexing of a single page to see the rank change. Granted the change if any would be small since on-page signals as I mentioned are a sliver of the signal pie. So most SEO's I would think would be of the opinion this 'trial-and-error' is a waste of time?
-
Hi SEO1805
I agree with Casey, if you go into your Google Analytics account and do a fetch and render to check the new/revised page and then request indexing you will normally see the results updated in a few hours.
Do realize tho that of course google is not a single server, so one person may see the updates very soon and others may not right away as the search index propagates to Googles servers.
Of course the search consol will also tell you how many pages Google is visiting every day so you have an idea about how often they think you are updating your content.
Take care,
Herb
-
Exactly what Logopedia y Más said!
I've just made some sitewide changes to a client site today (3-4 hours ago) and done a fetch straight after, some are already reflected in the SERPs while some aren't. So it really just depends, however, I find it typically doesn't take too long with the sites I have dealt with

-
Hi Seo 1805.
Put, indexing and ranking higher in Google isn’t an exact science. There's really no set timetable for how quickly your new page will be indexed by Google.
It isn’t guaranteed that the URL will be crawled again or that it will be done immediately. It usually takes several days to accept a request. Please also note that they can't guarantee that Google will index all the changes made, since to update the indexed content depends on a complex algorithm.
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
-
My product category pages are not being indexed on google can someone help?
My website has been indexed on google and all of its pages can be found on google except for the product category pages - which are where we want our traffic heading to, so this is a big problem for us. Our website is www.skirtinguk.com And an example of a page that isn't being indexed is https://www.skirtinguk.com/product-category/mdf-skirting-board/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chelseaskirtinguk0 -
"Null" appearing as top keyword in "Content Keywords" under Google index in Google Search Console
Hi, "Null" is appearing as top keyword in Google search console > Google Index > Content Keywords for our site http://goo.gl/cKaQ4K . We do not use "null" as keyword on site. We are not able to find why Google is treating "null" as a keyword for our site. Is anyone facing such issue. Thanks & Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
What referrer is shown in http request when google crawler visit a page?
Is it legit to show different content to http request having different referrer? case a: user view one page of the site with plenty of information about one brand, and click on a link on that page to see a product detail page of that brand, here I don't want to repeat information about the brand itself case b: a user view directly the product detail page clicking on a SERP result, in this case I would like to show him few paragraph about the brand Is it bad? Anyone have experience in doing it? My main concern is google crawler. Should not be considered cloaking because I am not differentiating on user-agent bot-no-bot. But when google is crawling the site which referrer will use? I have no idea, does anyone know? When going from one link to another on the website, is google crawler leaving the referrer empty?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | max.favilli0 -
How to get content to index faster in Google.....pubsubhubbub?
I'm curious to know what tools others are using to get their content to index faster (other than html sitmap and pingomatic, twitter, etc) Would installing the wordpress pubsubhubbub plugin help even though it uses pingomatic? http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pubsubhubbub/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Best practice for removing indexed internal search pages from Google?
Hi Mozzers I know that it’s best practice to block Google from indexing internal search pages, but what’s best practice when “the damage is done”? I have a project where a substantial part of our visitors and income lands on an internal search page, because Google has indexed them (about 3 %). I would like to block Google from indexing the search pages via the meta noindex,follow tag because: Google Guidelines: “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 Bad user experience The search pages are (probably) stealing rankings from our real landing pages Webmaster Notification: “Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site” with links to our internal search results I want to use the meta tag to keep the link juice flowing. Do you recommend using the robots.txt instead? If yes, why? Should we just go dark on the internal search pages, or how shall we proceed with blocking them? I’m looking forward to your answer! Edit: Google have currently indexed several million of our internal search pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HrThomsen0 -
Should I use both Google and Bing's Webmaster Tools at the same time?
Hi All, Up till now I've been registered only to Google WMT. Do you recommend using at the same time Bing's WMT? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Disallowed Pages Still Showing Up in Google Index. What do we do?
We recently disallowed a wide variety of pages for www.udemy.com which we do not want google indexing (e.g., /tags or /lectures). Basically we don't want to spread our link juice around to all these pages that are never going to rank. We want to keep it focused on our core pages which are for our courses. We've added them as disallows in robots.txt, but after 2-3 weeks google is still showing them in it's index. When we lookup "site: udemy.com", for example, Google currently shows ~650,000 pages indexed... when really it should only be showing ~5,000 pages indexed. As another example, if you search for "site:udemy.com/tag", google shows 129,000 results. We've definitely added "/tag" into our robots.txt properly, so this should not be happening... Google showed be showing 0 results. Any ideas re: how we get Google to pay attention and re-index our site properly?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | udemy0 -
Google is indexing wordpress attachment pages
Hey, I have a bit of a problem/issue what is freaking me out a bit. I hope you can help me. If i do site:www.somesitename.com search in Google i see that Google is indexing my attachment pages. I want to redirect attachment URL's to parent post and stop google from indexing them. I have used different redirect plugins in hope that i can fix it myself but plugins don't work. I get a error:"too many redirects occurred trying to open www.somesitename.com/?attachment_id=1982 ". Do i need to change something in my attachment.php fail? Any idea what is causing this problem? get_header(); ?> /* Run the loop to output the attachment. * If you want to overload this in a child theme then include a file * called loop-attachment.php and that will be used instead. */ get_template_part( 'loop', 'attachment' ); ?>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TauriU0