Fetch as Google After an Important Change

The page changed and the result did not

You raise your prices, change your hours or drop a service, update the website, and search for yourself. Google still shows the old version.

Google revisits pages on its own schedule. A home page with plenty of links may be checked every few days; a quiet page about one service can wait weeks.

Meanwhile customers read last season's price or last year's hours in the search result, and either phone to ask or decide on the wrong information.

Search Console, Google's free set of tools for site owners, includes a way to ask for a page to be looked at again. It is called Fetch as Google.

Changes worth a fetch

• Prices, when the ones in search results are now wrong.
• Hours or days open, especially a new closing day.
• A service you have stopped, still described as available.
• A new phone number, or a new address after a move.
• A correction to something inaccurate or embarrassing.
• A page that was broken when Google last visited.

The last is easy to miss. If Google happened to call while a page was blank or showing an error, that is the version it keeps until it comes back.

How it works

In Search Console, open the site, then Crawl, then Fetch as Google. Type the part of the address after your domain, or leave the box empty for the home page.

Choose desktop or smartphone and press Fetch. Google requests the page as its crawler would and reports what came back.

If the fetch succeeds, Search Console offers to submit the page to Google's index: either that page alone, or that page and the pages it links to.

There is a monthly allowance, generous for single pages and much smaller for the option that includes linked pages. A small business rarely comes near either.

Fetch and render

The second button, Fetch and Render, goes further. It shows two pictures side by side: the page as Google saw it, and the page as a visitor would.

If the two differ, something is hiding content from Google, often a stylesheet or script that the site's robots.txt file blocks. The tool lists what it could not load.

After a change, it is a quick way to confirm Google can see the new prices, and not an empty box where they should be.

Check the description too

The text under a search result often comes from the page's meta description, a short summary in the code that visitors never see on the page itself.

Owners update the visible prices and forget the summary. Google fetches the page, finds the old price still in the description, and keeps showing it.

Before fetching, check the page title and description as well as the visible text. Your web developer can show you both in a minute.

A worked example

A helicopter tour company flying sightseeing and glacier tours from a small airfield sets its season prices every February.

This year it dropped its shortest flight, added a longer tour with a glacier landing and raised the price of the rest. The tours page was updated on the first of the month.

Two weeks later, a search for the company still showed last season's starting price under the result. Google's cached copy of the page was dated October.

The page itself was right, but its meta description still carried the old starting price, and callers kept quoting it to the office.

The office manager corrected the description, then fetched the tours page and the home page and submitted both, the tours page with its direct links.

By the end of the week the result showed this season's price, and the calls about last year's stopped.

What it cannot do

A fetch asks; it does not order. Google decides whether and when to update its index, and nothing here changes how a page ranks.

It cannot fetch a page blocked by robots.txt or hidden behind a login, it will not get a page marked noindex into results, and it cannot remove a page; that is a separate tool.

It does nothing for other search engines. Bing has its own webmaster tools, with its own way to submit a changed page.

The listing is a separate job

The hours, phone number and address beside your result, and in the map listings, usually come from Google My Business, not from your website.

Change them there at the same time as the site. A fetched page with new hours and a listing with old ones gives customers two answers.

The same goes for directories, review sites and your Facebook page, anywhere your hours appear. Make the list once and work through it after every change.

Set it up before you need it

Fetch as Google is available only to verified owners of a site in Search Console. Verification is done once, usually by your developer adding a small file or a line of code.

Add the version of the address your site actually uses, with or without www, and http or https. Search Console treats each as a separate site.

And make sure someone at the business has access, not only the developer who set it up three years ago.

The counter-case

Most changes do not need a fetch. A new photograph, a reworded paragraph or a fixed typo can wait for Google's next visit.

Sites that change often are visited often, so a busy blog or shop sees its updates appear without help.

And a fetch never substitutes for getting the page right. A fresh copy of a confusing page is still confusing.

For changes that affect what customers decide, such as prices, hours, services and contact details, update the page and its description, then fetch it.

After the next change

1. Update the visible text on every affected page.
2. Update the title and description in the code.
3. Change Google My Business at the same time.
4. Fetch and render the page on both settings.
5. Submit it, with direct links if several pages changed.
6. Check the cached copy a few days later.
7. Update directories and your Facebook page.

Step two is the one people forget. The visible page gets the new price, the summary in the code keeps the old one, and the fetch faithfully collects the mistake.

Fetch and Render on the smartphone setting also shows whether a pop-up covers the page, the subject of Google's phone pop-up rule starts today.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.