Google has launched a new feature in Google Search Console that allows web site owners to request a Recrawl of their own web site. I suspect that this is in response to web site owners, such as myself, complaining over the past few weeks about Google’s slowdown in indexing. Google announced this feature on Twitter.
The new Recrawl feature, which appears to me to be fairly instantaneous, causes Google to instantly start recrawling your web site, starting from the web site’s home page, the URL that you have verified in Google Search Console. I’ve verified this independently, as I’ve personally clicked the Recrawl Now feature and looked to see what happened.
I took a look at the Google cache date for the home page, and it appears to have been updated very recently–which tells me that there’s a very good chance that this feature is working. I normally use the Google Fetch and Render feature when I really want a page crawled and indexed quickly, but honestly this may be the next best thing.
Right now the Recrawl now feature is only showing up in the New Google Search Console. It may be a limited feature or only a test, but if they do keep the feature it will be a welcome response by webmasters such as myself.
In order to access this new Google Search Console feature, you must be logged into your Google Account and access the new Google Search Console. You should see the feature on the left side. I normally recommend using the sitemap feature to get sites crawled–as that is what Google recommends. However, Recrawl Now is something that you may want to only click on and use once in a while.
