Is it dangerous to use "Fetch as Google" too much in Webmaster Tools?
-
I saw some people freaking out about this on some forums and thought I would ask.
Are you aware of there being any downside to use "Fetch as Google" often? Is it a bad thing to do when you create a new page or blog post, for example?
-
Hi Keri
I did yes, i stumbled upon it and thought i'd give my two pennies worth as an SEO!
Certainly wasnt looking for a backlink as it would be pretty irrelevant for our industry and would never expect a dofollow links from a comments section anyway.
Thanks to you also for your feedback
Cheers!
-
Welcome, LoveSavings. Just wanted to make sure you knew this post is a year old, and that all of the links in Q&A are automatically nofollowed. Thanks for the thoughtful answer!
-
Having done lots of tests on this, i would say that fetching as google is the best wat forward.
Although the steps listed above are all excellent ways of boosting the speed at which google will index your page, none of them seem to be as effective as fetching in webmaster tools. you can a few hundred of these a month, so you shouldnt run out unless you are publishing immense amounts of content - in which case google is likely to be indexing your content very quickly anyway.
www.loveenergysavings.com is still relatively small although we publish excellent, though leadership style content. so, to ensure that our posts are indexed as quickly as possible (as we are competing with some massive sites) we always fetch our posts in google webmaster tools. this is always quicker than tweeting, google+ etc. we also have an xml sitemap which automatically adds our post, this doesnt guarantee rapid indexing though.
having messed around with all of these methods, fetching as g-bot is always the quickest and most effective option. as danatanseo says, its there to be utilised by seo's so why not take full advantage? i can't see why google would ever look unfavourably on a site for wanting its content to be available to the public as quickly as possible?
-
I would say it is not a preferred way to alert Google when you have a new page and it is pretty limited. What is better, and frankly more effective is to do things like:
- add the page to your XML sitemap (make sure sitemap is submitted to Google)
- add the page to your RSS feeds (make sure your RSS is submitted to Google)
- add a link to the page on your home page or other "important" page on your site
- tweet about your new page
- status update in FB about your new page
- Google Plus your new page
- Feature your new page in your email newsletter
Obviously, depending on the page you may not be able to do all of these, but normally, Google will pick up new pages in your sitemap. I find that G hits my sitemaps almost daily (your mileage may vary).
I only use fetch if I am trying to diagnose a problem on a specific page and even then, I may just fetch but not submit. I have only submitted when there was some major issue with a page that I could not wait for Google to update as a part of its regular crawl of my site. As an example, we had a release go out with a new section and that section was blocked by our robots.txt. I went ahead and submitted the robots.txt to encourage Google to update the page sooner so that our new section would be :"live" to Google sooner as G does not hit our robots.txt as often. Otherwise for 99.5% of my other pages on sites, the options above work well.
The other thing is that you get very few fetches a month, so you are still very limited in what you can do. Your sitemaps can include thousands of pages each. Google fetch is limited, so another reason I reserve it for my time sensitive emergencies.
-
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/158587?hl=en#158587
I just double-checked David, and it looks like the allocation may not be different for different sites. According to Google you get 500 fetches and 10 URL + Linked pages submissions every week.
-
You are welcome David, and no this isn't a lifetime limit at all. I believe it resets at least once every 30 days, maybe more often than that. I manage four different sites, some large, some small and I've never run out of fetches yet.
-
Thanks Dana. Is it possible to get more fetches? Presumably it's not a lifetime limit, right?
-
No, I wouldn't worry about this at all. This is why Google has already allocated a finite number of "Fetches" and URL + Links submissions to your account. These numbers are based on the size of your site. Larger sites are allocated more and smaller sites less. [Please see my revised statement below regarding Google's "Fetch" limits - it isn't based on site size] I don't think enough Webmasters take advantage of the Fetch as often as they should.
Hope that helps!
Dana
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Links to my site still showing in Webmaster Tools from a non-existent site
We owned 2 sites, with the pages on Site A all linking over to similar pages on Site B. We wanted to remove the links from Site A to Site B, so we redirected all the links on Site A to the homepage on Site A, and took Site A down completely. Unfortunately we are still seeing the links from Site A coming through on Google Webmaster Tools for Site B. Does anybody know what else we can do to remove these links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pedstores0 -
List of SEO "to do's" to increase organic rankings
We are looking for a complete list of all white hat SEO "to do's" that an SEO firm should do in order to help increase Google/Bing/Yahoo organic rankings. We would like to use this list to be sure that the SEO company/individual we choose uses all these white hat items as part of an overall SEO strategy to increase organic rankings. Can anyone please point me in the right direction as to where we can obtain this complete list? If this is not the best approach, please let me know what is, as I am not an SEO person. Thank you kindly in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RetractableAwnings.com0 -
Whch Google Advanced Search Query To Use?
Hi basically i want to find sites which mention a specific exact keyword on the page e.g. "BMW" but the same keyword "BMW" is not contained in the title tag of the page. Is there a advanced search query to do this? I did try “BMW” Intitle:"-bmw" no luck. I do also have scrapebox if there is a way to do this through that. Cheers, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mikey0080 -
REPOST: How much does "overall site semantic theme" influence rankings?
Hello everyone on the new cool Moz! I've optimized sites before that are dedicated to 1, 2 or 3 products and or services. These sites inherently talk about one main thing - so the semantics of the content across the whole site reflect this. I get these ranked well on a local level. Now, take an e-commerce site - which I am working on - 2000 products, all of which are quite varied - cookware, diningware, art, decor, outdoor, appliances... there is a lot of different semantics throughout the site's different pages. Does this influence the ranking possibilities? Your opinion and time is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20101 -
End of March we migrated our site over to HubSpot. We went from page 3 on Google to non existent. Still found on page 2 of Yahoo and Bing. Beyond frustrated...HELP PLEASE "www.vortexpartswashers.com"
End of March we migrated our site over to HubSpot. We went from page 3 on Google to non existent. Still found on page 2 of Yahoo and Bing under same keywords " parts washers" Beyond frustrated...HELP PLEASE "www.vortexpartswashers.com"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhart0 -
How much (%) of the content of a page is considered too much duplication?
Google is not fond of duplication, I have been very kindly told. So how much would you suggest is too much?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonberenyi0 -
Google ranking for the term "locum tenens"
Hello- My company is having a very difficult time performing well for the term "locum tenens". This term literally defines our industry and target market (temporary physician staffing, essentially) and is by far the most searched term in our industry (30k / month, give or take). For us, “locum tenens” is like “ice cream” is to Ben & Jerry’s. Of course, there are other keywords we're concerned with, but this is by far the most important single term. We've moved up to page 3 a few times since launching our redesigned site in April, but seem to continuously settle on page 5 (we've been on page 5 for many weeks now). While I didn’t expect us to be on page 1 at this point, I having a hard time understanding why we’re not on at least 2 or 3, in light of the sites ahead of us. We have a ton of decent, optimized content and we’ve tried not to be too spammy (every page does have locum tenens on it many times, but it describes our service – it’s hard not to use it many times). We are working on developing backlinks and are avoiding any spammy backlink schemes (I get calls every day from companies saying they can give me 400 backlinks a month, which I have a hard time believing is a good long term strategy). It just sort of seems like our site is cursed for some reason that I can't understand. We are working with a competent SEO firm, and still have not made much progress for this term. So, I’m hoping maybe the community here might have some helpful advice. Our site is www.bartonassociates.com. Any insight you guys may have would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanks in advance and have a great day. Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ba_seomoz0 -
Yoast meta description in ' ' instead of " " problem
Hi Guys this is really strange, i am using yoast seo for wordpress on two sites. On both sites i am seeing meta name='description' instead of meta name="description" And this is why google is probably not reading it correctly, on many other link submission sites which read your meta data automatically say site blocked. How to i fix this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0