The "Fetch As Google" limit has been decreased - what now?

[MSGroup]

Since Google decreased the "Fetch As Google" limit to ten pages per day, we've been a bit stuck. We're publishing 20-30 content pages per day, targeting a huge range of search queries. Circa 40% of our traffic comes to us through these pages.

Since we're now heavily restricted on submitting these to Google, who's got other ideas to get the pages picked up quickly? I'm slightly concerned because although the pages link outwards to other areas of the website, no other areas of the site link to these pages. They're purely top-of-the-funnel.

We can't be the only people with this concern. How would you address it?

[PaulM01]

Although I think it depends a little on how 'important' it thinks your site is, I think google crawls sites with regularly updated content very frequently, so I'd suspect that as long as you're linking to this content from somewhere prominent on your site, you shouldn't have an issue.

You could also use a sitemap to tell google about fresh content, perhaps also consider applying to google news if you can, and then use a news sitemap which google will certainly be very quick to check and spider new urls from. In the advice for google news, they also suggest posting content to google+, so I'd also use that to post new content to, as it's another method of telling google you have something fresh for them to spider.

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi MSG

You should not have to fetch as Google to get your pages indexed and please with deference to Paul, above, posting on Google+ will not speed up indexing. If it did then people would be all over it and they are not. You also can only apply to Google news if you have a newsworthy site and I can tell you right now that 90+% of sites are rejected because what they post is not news.

The fact that a page is posted puts it in the sitemap which is picked up by Google. Also depending on the size of your site some of it is crawled by Google every day. Just go to Google Seach Console Crawl Stats to see that.

I have seen pages indexed in under a minute (none news sites - yes seriously) and others take a week. What is of major concern is how you say that these pages are not linked from anywhere because there lies a large part of your problem. You need a proper site structure so that link juice passes from the main menu down through all the pages of your website. The more 'shallow' this is, the better as the pages are closer to the top.

If you are burying pages deep in your website with no logical route to them then they are just not going to rank quickly.

Read more on site architecture here: https://moz.com/blog/site-architecture-for-seo It's old but still very relevant.

You need a solid site structure which starts with the main menu with proper departments, categories and if necessary, sub-categories.

Sort that out and you will see your pages indexed much quicker.

If you can get do-follow backlinks then this will help, but certainly not from Facebook and G+ as they are all nofollow.

Regards

Nigel

[PaulM01]

You maybe right about Google+,  but that said, in the google news guidelines, they do suggest that they may use google+ to 'better surface content'.

"Add or edit your Google+ Page URL. We may use publicly available information from your Google+ page to deliver a better news experience and to better surface your content. "

https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/4581428?hl=en-GB

[MSGroup]

Thank you very much. That's really helpful and I appreciate you putting so much time into your answer.

[MSGroup]

Thank you. Will have a go at Google News - not sure we fit the criteria but can't hurt to try, eh??