How to Get Your SEO Changes Noticed Faster by Google

You’ve made some changes to your website and you’re ready for the world to see them. But there’s one problem: even though the changes have been made on your end, they haven’t shown up on Google yet. So how do you get Google to take notice of the changes you made and update its rankings? 

There are two main ways.

Use the URL Inspection Tool inside of Google Search Console

One way to get Google to recrawl your website is by using the URL Inspection Tool inside of Google Search Console. This tool allows you to submit a specific URL from your website for Google to recrawl. That way, you can be sure that the search engine is seeing the most recent version of that particular page. (TIP: Search Console is great to set up as it gives you a bunch of stats about your domain and if your pages are indexed properly in Google.)

To use this tool, simply go to Google Search Console and select the property you want to work with. Then, click on “URL Inspection” from the left-hand menu. Next, type in or paste the URL of the page you want Google to recrawl into the search bar and hit “enter.” Once the page has been found, click on “Request Indexing.” And that’s it! Google will now recrawl that particular URL.

‘Ping’ Your XML Sitemap

2024 Update: Google has deprecated the ability to ping your XML Sitemap using the below steps:

Pinging an XML sitemap is a way to notify Google about updates to your website content. When you have a new or updated sitemap, you can "ping" it to ask Google to crawl and index the new/updated pages.

To ping your sitemap, simply replace [your domain sitemap URL] with the actual location of your XML sitemap

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=[your domain sitemap URL]

For me, it is: 

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=https://www.scottredgate.com/sitemap.xml

Put this URL into your browser and hit enter to send the ping request to Google. 

You should be greeted with a message that looks like this: 

Summary

If you’ve made some changes to your website and you’re wondering why they haven’t shown up on Google yet, don’t worry— there are two easy ways to get the search engine to take notice. The first is by using the URL Inspection Tool inside of Google Search Console, and the second is by ‘pinging’ your XML sitemap. By following these simple steps, you can be sure that Google will recrawl your site and take note of all of the changes you’ve made!