Is it dangerous to use "Fetch as Google" too much in Webmaster Tools?

[BlueLinkERP]

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?

[LoveSaving]

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!

[KeriMorgret]

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!

[LoveSaving]

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?

[CleverPhD]

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.

[danatanseo]

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.

[danatanseo]

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.

[BlueLinkERP]

Thanks Dana. Is it possible to get more fetches? Presumably it's not a lifetime limit, right?

[danatanseo]

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