Getting pages corrected and reindexed in Google
We’ve all done it. You upload a new page or new content to your site and there is a mistake in it. The headline includes a terrible typo, or you missed a zero of the promotional price banner. In the past, all you could do was wait for Google to respider and then reindex the page. Depending on the the site and how deep into it the page was, it could take some time. All very difficult.
Google’s Webmaster Tools has now added a natty new tool feature overcomes this. You’ll find it under ‘Diganostics’ and then ‘Fetch as Googlebot’.
Fetch as Googlebot has been around for a while. It allows you to ask Googlebot to come and spider a page. Enter the URL, click fetch and the page will be listed. Simply click ‘success’ when the page has been spidered and you will see the code that Google has read. The tool was initially intended to allow webmasters to check to see if their sites had been hacked, but it is also useful as it shows the header status code (showing any redirects etc) and the download time, an increasingly important factor used to determine rankings.
The new feature is that you can now submit the page to Google meaning that the new page or content beats the queue for getting spidered.
You can go further and ask Google to respider and reindex all the pages that the corrected page links to you.
There is a limit on the use of Fetch as Googlebot. Matts Cutts in his video on this says you have 50 fetches per week and 10 linked pages submissions. But I have a WMT account with about 30 domains on it and that is allowing me 500 fetches, but across all the domains of course. I am still limited to 10 linked page submissions though.
This tool has been around for about six months, but if you missed it’s very useful to know about for when next drama happens.
Google’s Matt Cutts describes the process in more detail
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SEO and competitive analysis
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Tags: Finding contacts
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Researching your link profile
I was presenting a course on how to optimise on page content last week in Eastleigh and the subject of link profiles came up – not surprisingly perhaps in any SEO presentation.
The tool I recommend is Majestic SEO’s site explorer. It offers quite a lot for free – all you need to do is register – and if you want to look at more sites or go into greater depth then subscriptions start at £9.99 per month.
Wordtracker also provides an excellent tool called Linkbuilder. This is more expensive and its interface is easier to use and analyses the links a bit more for you – but the data is taken from Majestic SEO, Wordtracker then make it a little more accessible.
Google and the taxman
The world of anyone working in SEO is dominated by Google, perhaps to an unhealthy degree it is, what we eat and breath. Google has come in for a lot of stick in recent years especially in relation to privacy issues and is also increasingly Master of the Online Universe which is worrying. I am thinking of the way in which it dominates the online
space, even to the point of requiring direction from US Justice Department to limit its control of the online travel space following its acquitision of ITA.
But we all know Google’s motto, ‘Don’t be Evil’ and to some extent it has managed to retain for itself some of the internet’s original ethos of generosity and openness, the
brand of Larry Page and Sergey Brin developing this massive wonderful technology to open information up to the whole world.
Well that’s one idea. A very different view of what Google has become is outlined in the Sunday Times article (May 29th) on Google’s brilliance at tax avoidance. The amount
of US, UK, and Irish tax that Google has managed not to pay is eye watering. But then before we are too critical and moralistic about it, who of us pays more tax than we
legally have to and given the opportunity to rearrange out affairs to reduce our tax liability, which of us would say ‘but it is my civic duty to pay tax’?
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that a company capable of developing such an awesome tool as the Google search engine is more than capable of developing a ‘tax efficient’
financial and corporate structure. Is this the internet losing its innocence and growing up into a corporate adult?
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