Google Search Console has brought back request indexing

SEO Specialists across the world are all dependent on one thing: Google. Though other search engines exist (and can be incredibly valuable in the right circumstances), we all know that Google runs the show. That means that when Google decides to pause something or update something, marketers everywhere have to change the way we do things to accommodate. One such thing has been the suspension of the Request Indexing tool in Google Search Console. 

One of the key tools in an SEO marketers kit is Google Search Console. This is central to any technical SEO strategy; essentially a way to see exactly what Google sees when it crawls your site. It shows us when there’s a broken link where there shouldn’t be, if your site is performing as it should on mobile, and how often Google is coming back to the site. It also features a very useful tool: Request Indexing. This tool is a way to inform Google that something is new on the site, and that they should send a crawler to the site to push that change into their search results. 

Without this, updates to sites can take days, if not weeks, to appear on searches. Google usually sends its crawlers to the site based on how frequently it’s updated (which is one of the reasons that we always recommend a site news section), so a site that’s being relaunched after a long period of inactivity would have to be launched with the caveat that we wouldn’t be able to guarantee a quick appearance in search results.