How to entice a re-crawl of your WordPress website by a Search Engine?

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Your website has received SEO and content updates, but you still do not notice any SEO ranking improvement. Yes, the internet is really big and search engines do take time for crawl of a websites, but it is possible to entice Google to a re-crawl your website.

This, of course, it is not possible instantly. You can ask manually that Google does a recrawl but, again, it will take time as your request with the link goes into a queue for recrawling.

Depending on the reason why you want a re-crawl there are a few different options on how to make it happen.

If you have added new pages, posts or changed the content of your existing website articles, now you need to make an XML sitemap.

This sitemap is a directory of your website pages that are accessible by all visitors, and it does not improve your search ranking directly, but it will make it easy for the search engine to index all your website pages.

For beginners, the easy way to make an XML Sitemap is to use an SEO plugin such as Yoast WordPress SEO.

How to get the manual crawl?

To be absolutely sure that Google can “see” your website, you should create a Google Webmaster Account and list your website with Google. After adding it go to Settings > Reading and make sure your website is visible.

Next, install Yoast SEO plugin and you will get a new SEO entry on the left side of your WordPress dashboard. Go to Search Console and add your website by typing it in the field and choosing “Add  Property”. As another method, you can use “HTML tag” by adding a meta tag in your WordPress page code.

With the Webmaster tool, you will receive your Google verification code, which you need to add in the Yoast SEO General settings. After the verification has completed a turn on the XML Sitemap option in the SEO plugin.

Finally, go back to the Search Console within your Webmaster Account, and choose Sitemap under Crawl settings, and add your Sitemap (should be sitemap_index.xml). Take note that after you have listed your website with Google they will make an automatic crawl of your website, but the manual adding of the Sitemap speeds up things considerably.

After this, Google will re-crawl your sitemap often, and it will add updated posts and articles quickly as they are added to the sitemap.

The value of manual re-crawl request

While this process does not give additional search ranking points, the overall better SEO that it provides will get your articles and posts displayed in the Google search sooner rather than later, and your website will go faster up the search ranks.