Google’s John Mueller explains how to trigger a complete website re-indexing

In the world of SEO, we are always looking for answers to some questions and one of the big questions when our website stops indexing is to figure out what exactly went wrong and then trying to get the website to be re-indexed. Google is known to answer some questions that SEOs have and recently, the official YouTube channel for Google Search Central uploaded one such video which was regarding how to trigger a complete re-indexing of their website if the Googlebot stops crawling the pages.

In the video, Google’s John Mueller said “Today’s question is whether there’s a mechanism to request re-indexing of a whole website at once.” and added that “Unfortunately, no. There is currently no way to trigger a recrawl and reprocessing of a whole website all at once. When you make major changes on a website, search engines will generally update those automatically over time. There’s nothing additional that you have to do.” However, it was not all a dud and John did explain a few things that could help in re-indexing your website in Google. He said there are a few points you need to consider:

1. Use 301 response codes to alert search engines that a webpage has moved so that the new pages are discovered.
2. Use 404 server response codes to tell search engines that a page no longer exists.
3. Google tends to give high priority to crawling important pages of a website like the home page, which means that linking key pages from important pages is a good strategy.
4. Important changes such as new telephone numbers (and probably street addresses) should ideally be noted on the most important pages of a website.

Obviously, even if there is another method to trigger complete re-indexing of websites then also we are sure Google will not let us know about it because that would give the ideas to SEOs to do the same in case their website is not being indexed. We have seen that 301 redirects have been quite common in the SEO world and now that even Google gave the recommendation in their video gives a validation of the technique as well.