Ask Yoast:

Changes to your site and the search results

Whenever you make some big changes to your website, for instance to your brand name, you’re probably eager for these changes to show in the search results. Unfortunately, it can take a while for Google to crawl your site again and until then, it will show the indexed version of your site in the results, without the changes. Of course, when people click to your site they will see the changes, but you want them to be visible in the results pages too.

So, is there anything you can do to help or speed up this process? And is there anything else to bear in mind when making these changes? Let’s get into that in this Ask Yoast!

Jolene Moody emailed us her question on this topic:

“I recently changed the name of my business. We have changed it in the WordPress dashboard too. But I didn’t see the change yet in the search results. How long does it take Google to show this change?”

Watch the video or read the transcript for the answer!

Helping Google pick up changes on your site

“It depends on how often Google visits your site and you probably don’t know how often that is. Now, what you can do is go to Google search console and go to ‘Fetch & render’ and then fetch and render your homepage. Then, after it’s done, there’s an option to submit to index. At that point, Google will have already crawled your site and will use that data to show your site in the index, so when people search for your brand, at least your homepage will have the proper brand name.

But it’s very important if you change the name of your business and people are still searching for the old name of your business, that you also have the old name of your business on your site somewhere. That way people can still find you for that when they don’t know that you’ve renamed your business. Good luck!”

Read more: SEO Basics: What is Googlebot? »

Ask Yoast series

17 Responses to Changes to your site and the search results

  1. carmenb14
    carmenb14  • 6 years ago

    I liked it a lot, it’s a pretty complete plugin, with this it has surpassed everything, thank you.

  2. Raj
    Raj  • 6 years ago

    The Fetch and render really works, especially to index the News post for our website because it need to be Index in the search engine as fast as it can be to get relevant traffic…

    • Willemien Hallebeek
      Willemien Hallebeek  • 6 years ago

      Great to hear that!

  3. Santousha Kalk
    Santousha Kalk  • 6 years ago

    Good tip!

    I recently launched and was looking for something like this.

  4. קידום אתרים בגוגל
    קידום אתרים בגוגל  • 6 years ago

    very interesting. thankx

  5. seogoogle
    seogoogle  • 6 years ago

    great post. helps a lot

  6. Christopher Jeanes
    Christopher Jeanes  • 6 years ago

    When you “fetch and render” a URL that has already been indexed it shows up as Redirected. Is this okay and does the search engine still index it properly?

    Also, does uploading a new site map to the Google Search Console hell Google to learn about site changes faster?

    • Christopher Jeanes
      Christopher Jeanes  • 6 years ago

      I misspelled *help* (oops)

  7. bettingofferstoday
    bettingofferstoday  • 6 years ago

    Thanks for the helpful post, I have changed my business logo, should there be anything for me to do?

    Or

    Do I just carry on as normal?

    Thankyou!

    • Willemien Hallebeek
      Willemien Hallebeek  • 6 years ago

      Hi, it depends. If you still see your old logo somewhere in the search results you should have Google fetch and render your page, as described above.

  8. Errica
    Errica  • 6 years ago

    Hey Joost, This is great information. One of the blog i follow on regular basis had changed their business name and was wondering how to do it. This article explains it all.

    Thank you.

    • Willemien Hallebeek
      Willemien Hallebeek  • 6 years ago

      Great! Good luck with your blog

  9. Kriminologi.id
    Kriminologi.id  • 6 years ago

    If you implement better sitemap structure (like crawl rate) it can be more helpfully to faster the process of re-indexing in your website.

  10. nexvan
    nexvan  • 6 years ago

    Hello
    It was very useful
    I recently changed my site’s brand
    I’ll ask you a few questions soon

  11. Konstantin
    Konstantin  • 6 years ago

    I have read a lot about SEO and recently started a new blog with a couple of long tailed keywords of a low competition. My first post is with a good SEO score, but I can not see the rank in serp. Is my site new to be ranked by Google or I have done something wrong (overoptimized) and need to do some amendments on it? Also, can you please advise how you can do internal link building if you have just started and have only 2 pages, or should I not care about it for now?

    • Willemien Hallebeek
      Willemien Hallebeek  • 6 years ago

      Hi Konstantin, If you just started, you should focus on producing content (start writing more!) and getting some external links to it, so Google can find your content. Of course while writing, you can set up your internal links well too. Perhaps this article will help you out: https://yoast.com/seo-for-a-new-website-the-very-first-things-to-do/


Check out our must read articles about Content SEO