Google Website Crawling on Demand

The inclusion of a website on the Google index can make a huge difference in how much traffic is directed to that website from the search engine. Before, it was necessary to wait for the Google's crawler to naturally discover one's website through their traditional methods, but now a website can be submitted for immediate consideration through the webmaster Fetch tool. This Googlebot feature is an indispensible way for administrators to potentially shorten the amount of time it takes their new website or updates to be recognized and listed on the Google index.

The process is fairly simple to use and promises an incredible increase to the workflow proficiency of having one's online information listed in Google's index. To take advantage of this function, simply use Diagnostics>Fetch as Googlebot to retrieve the URL one wishes to submit for inclusion. When the website is successfully retrieved by the Googlebot function, an option to submit will appear next to the selected URL. When the URL is selected, further options to submit additionally linked content will appear. This is the heart of on demand crawling that is now available through this Googlebot feature.

Google's original crawl function is algorithmic software that examines the web on a continuous basis. The crawler searches pages based on ranking and number of links related to a particular website. When the crawler discovers a page it examines that page for possible inclusion in Google's index of the web. There are suggested parameters for increasing the crawl friendly nature of a website and its updates but Google operates this function on a strictly utilitarian basis and does not accept payment to increase the number of crawls. This is why the new on demand option can be more beneficial to drawing attention to a particular website despite its age.

There is also a crawl on demand request form that can be used without verifying. The Google form allows for very similar on demand service as the Fetch as Googlebot feature except one simply has to input the URL and hit submit rather than waiting for the bot to verify discovery. Both of these on demand crawling techniques have limitations as to the number of allowed submissions in a week based on whether the submission is a URL with or without linked pages. These Google crawl functions will potentially save webmasters the stress of waiting for their work to be discovered.