How often does Google re-index websites? John Mueller answers this question on Google’s SEO Snippets video series.
Today’s webmaster question was submitted by Jim from Vancouver in Washington. He asks how often does Google reindex a website? It seems like it’s much less often than it used to be. We add or remove pages from our site and it’s weeks before those changes are reflected in Google search.
You too might be wondering how long does it take for Google to recognize bigger changes on a website. And from there what can you do to speed that up.Looking at the whole website all at once or even within a short period of time can cause a significant load on a website. Googlebot tries to be polite and is limited to a certain number of pages every day. This number is automatically adjusted as we better recognize the limits of a website. Looking at portions of a website means that we have to prioritize how we crawl.
So how does this work? In general, Googlebot tries to crawl important pages more frequently to make sure that most critical pages are covered. Often this will be a websites home page or maybe higher-level category pages. New content is often mentioned and linked from there, so it’s a great place for us to start. We’ll recrawl these pages frequently, maybe every few days. maybe even much more frequently depending on the website.