How To Reindex a Blog Post so Google Re-Notices

Updating and re-using old content is a key time saving step in almost every blog niche. But each time you update a post, you should reindex a blog post in Google. This article explains how.

As Ann Hoffman puts it,

Repurposed content is the new reality of content marketing.

It’s true, ask yourself this, how much of the content you see on Facebook each day, whether it’s politics, finance, or just blogging content is absolutely first time ever original? More likely than not, it’s just expertly repurposed.

But before you repurpose content, that is, to share your existing content in new formats on new platforms to amplify your messages, don’t you think you should let ol’ Google know what’s going on?

In this post we’ll look a one quick step you should do whether you update, revise, redo or create anew with a piece of content: reindex a blog post to the Google Search engines.

The Quick Steps

1. Visit the Google Recrawl URLs webmaster page, scroll down to step 1, click Fetch as Google
2. Choose a verified property (here’s how to verify your website using Google Analytics)
3. Enter in your article slug, aka the portion after the .com/
4. Choose Desktop
5. Click Fetch and Render and wait about a minute for your Status to change from Pending
6. Click Request Indexing
7. Complete the I’m not a robot CAPTCHA
8. Choose to crawl only this URL, or crawl this URL and it’s direct links. This latter option recrawls the URL you’ve inputed and it’s directly linked pages.
9. Click GO
10. All done! Sit back and wait for hopefully a better position in Google Search now that you’ve resubmitted your content.

More Information on How to Reindex a Blog Post URL

Google already fairly succinctly explains the steps to ask Google to recrawl your URLs.

However the explanation isn’t quite complete.

Before you reindex a URL so Google notices it, you need to make sure you’ve verified the site the URL is coming from. Here’s how to verify your site using Google Analytics code. If you haven’t installed Google Analytics tracking on your self hosted WordPress blog, definitely watch this video and complete the quick steps.

Once you’ve verified your site, visit the Google bot fetch page and select your website.

Next, just type the slug of the post or page you want to reindex. The slug comes after the .com/

Choose Desktop then click Fetch and Render.

Once Google finds your post or page, a little button will appear above where it says “Indexing requested”. You can choose to recrawl just the page (I like this option) or crawl the page and all of it’s links.

Click on the button to recrawl, and you’re all set! Now you know how to reindex a blogpost to Google.

Greg Narayan blog tip: You can reindex blog posts up to 10 times per day using this method!

In the Future, Just Keep Google in the Loop!

I wrote this post in combination with Ana’s concept of repurposing because they just go hand in hand.

As you set out to reshare and redistribute your posts, you’ll surely find updates you want to make along the way. Go ahead and make those updates. And if you’re taking the time (or whole all-nighters like me) to update a blog post you really want to perform well and get more blog traffic, you definitely had better let Google know about it!

Imagine if Google didn’t notice all your hard work updating a post!

Of course, this is just the start of repurposing content. As you put your blog posts and messages in new posts, eBooks, guides, courses and more, make sure to submit any important links to Google and continuously generate a WordPress site map (we use Yoast SEO for this) to keep Google constantly abreast of what you’re creating!

Hear from you: Are you updating blog posts regularly? Do you look for new ways to get your best messages out there? If so, how are you going about it? Make sure to read the content repurposing article by Ana if you’re out of ideas!

Featured image courtesy of rawpixel