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: What is Googlebot? »
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I liked it a lot, it’s a pretty complete plugin, with this it has surpassed everything, thank you.
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…
Great to hear that!
Good tip!
I recently launched and was looking for something like this.
very interesting. thankx
great post. helps a lot
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?
I misspelled *help* (oops)
Hi Christopher, The fetch tool does not follow redirects; you can find instructions from Google for this issue here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6066468?hl=en .
And uploading a new sitemap will help indeed!
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!
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.
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.
Great! Good luck with your blog
If you implement better sitemap structure (like crawl rate) it can be more helpfully to faster the process of re-indexing in your website.
Hello
It was very useful
I recently changed my site’s brand
I’ll ask you a few questions soon
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?
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/