Forcing Googlebot look at my site again.

S.M.B.

Hi,

I'm pretty new to SEO and have a quick question.

I submitted a site for google to index but unfortunately there was a spelling mistake in my page title.

I've already corrected the mistake but is there any way to speed up google changing it's cached information?

Thanks,

SMB

Bluefrog

If you have a Windows Live account, you could try posting a link to your page and some accommpanying relevant text in your blog - I have seen Live blogs spidered within 15 minutes of being published and the spider should follow the link. Just don't duplicate the text from your own site - maybe provide a quick review.

The more longterm solution is to set up an account on Google webmaster tools, make an XML sitemap for your site and submit it via your webmaster tools account. You can then manually or automatically have the sitemap re-submitted every time you refresh your content. If it is a new site with few incoming links, it will still probably take up to 7 days for your site to be re-indexed from submission.

You should also make a robots.txt file in the root directory of your site and put a sitemaps directive in it:

SITEMAP: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

Also note there are similar tools for Yahoo in the form of Site Explorer, and Live Search Webmaster tools where you can alos submit your sitemap.

S.M.B.

Thanks for the quick reply,

It's a new site with very little incoming links. I already have my google webmaster account up and running.

I submitted a new robots.txt file which has been looked at since the changes but it hasn't effected the spelling mistake.

I've resubmitted a sitemap with an updated lastmod date but google hasn't checked it yet.

I guess i'll just have to wait which isn't that big a deal. Will my problem be solved the next time google looks at my sitemap then?

Thanks again.

Bluefrog

Yes, they'll pick up the change when they next re-index it. You could throw a link to it here too or maybe put it in your signature for a few days and see if that pulls Googlebot back any quicker.

notnem

Send me a private message and I'll give you a link or two to help you along the way.

S.M.B.

Google Webmaster is telling me that google has looked at my new sitemap in the past 24 hours but the spelling mistake is still there.

I've added the following tag to my site in the hope that google would remove it's cached info.

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">

Am I better off removing this? Am I actually telling google to not recache my site?

S.M.B.

The spelling mistake is still there! :mad:

Also, when you search a 'powered by google' search engine like the one on www.eircom.net there is no sign of the website yet this thread is now coming up because of my signature?

Does anyone know why this is happening?

Bluefrog

So we basically have a re-crawling frequency issue here. What's the URL with the issue? And how did you misspell it? Was it the fada in your sig? If so, then I'm not so sure it is something you want to correct -how many people will go to the trouble of putting a fada in a search query... I know from the 'correctness' point of view you may want to right this but I do think you should consider the SEO impact - the Title is a golden piece of SEO real estate. I do note that in the source of the website the title is still without the fada.

Submitting the sitemap is no guarantee the URL will be crawled immediately or even at all according to Google but I have found it generally will encourage them to take your site a little more seriously and crawl more frequently if it is submitted again when changes occur. However, there is no doubt that keeping the content fresh and increasing incoming links is the main way to get crawled more often.

That meta tag will make little difference to the crawl frequency - the only real effect that it will have is to stop them providing a cached version link in the results. But that will only happen when the page is re-indexed at which point your title will be updated anyway if it has been changed.

Judging by the cached version it is only 6 days since Google indexed - once a week would be a decent enough crawl rate for a site like this starting out and especially with no frequently updated content on the homepage.

S.M.B.

Thanks for the reply bluefrog,

I'm happy to leave the title of the website fada-less as nobody is going to be including these characters in the search query.

The spelling mistake is 'Co. Weathmeath' which i'm annoyed I didn't see before I submited the site to google.

I guess it's just a matter of waiting for google to re-crawl.

Cheers!

WizZard

You can remove a page from Google listings using GWT. It's a drastic course of action, but it's possible.
As long as Google is spidering you relatively regularly it shouldn't take too long to get back in (don't remove it if it is highly ranked though)

S.M.B.

3/4 of my pages have now been updated.

I guess I'll just wait it out for the others.

Thanks for all the help guys!

RedCardinal

WizZard wrote: »

You can remove a page from Google listings using GWT. It's a drastic course of action, but it's possible.
As long as Google is spidering you relatively regularly it shouldn't take too long to get back in (don't remove it if it is highly ranked though)

Maybe you should do some homework before giving advice like this...

URLs removed using the Removal tool in GWT will not be reindexed for 6 months.

WizZard

RedCardinal wrote: »

Maybe you should do some homework before giving advice like this...

URLs removed using the Removal tool in GWT will not be reindexed for 6 months.

Ah, apologies. I wasn't aware that there was a forced delay for reindexing.

And it's "only" 3 months (90 days) according to this