How does Google treat significant content changes to web pages and how should I flag them as such?

[tosbourn]

I have several pages (~30) that I have plans to overhaul. The URLs will be identical and the theme of the content will be the same (still talking about the same widgets, using the same language) but I will be adding a lot more useful information for users, specifically including things that I think will help with my fairly high bounce rate on these pages.

I believe the changes will be significant enough for Google to notice, I was wondering if it goes "this is basically a new page now, I will treat it as such and rank accordingly" or does it go "well this content was rubbish last time I checked so it is probably still not great".

My second question is, is there a way I can get Google to specifically crawl a page it already knows about with fresh eyes? I know in the Search Console I can ask Google to index new pages, and I've experimented with if I can ask it to crawl a page I know Google knows (it allows me to) but I couldn't see any evidence of it doing anything with that index.

Some background

The reason I'm doing this is because I noticed when these pages first ranked, they did very well (almost all first / second page for the terms I wanted). After about two weeks I've noticed them sliding down.

It doesn't look like the competition is getting any better so my running theory is they ranked well to begin with because they are well linked internally and the content is good/relevant and one of the main things negatively impacting me (that google couldn't know at the time) is bounce rate.

[tosbourn]

Thanks Matt,

I do have Search Console, sorry for not making that more clear in my question.

I've experimented with if I can ask it to crawl a page I know Google knows (it allows me to) but I couldn't see any evidence of it doing anything with that index.

Are you suggesting then that asking it to crawl a page already in its index does have an effect? If that is the case or if that is all I can do then perfect

[matt.nails]

Toby,

Do you have Google Search Console set up?

If so, you can easily request reindexing under the Crawl menu using the "Fetch as Google" function.

If you don't have search console, you can find it here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en

And here are directions from Google on how to set it up. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6001104?hl=en

Good luck,

Matt