A Simple Trick To Force Google to Crawl/Index Your Posts

Recently, I was teaching a group of students.

I wrote a new article and posted it immediately. The topic was fresh and it was to solve a problem that had just occurred in NECO exams for the first time (perhaps).

After doing some findings on why the problem occurred, I got something to write about it. Then, I and my students did it together.

Hopefully, we believed we'd rank number one the following day or later. Why? We're more likely the first to write about it. We're quick to be in the front line. And we covered almost everything we had about it.

Ok. What eventually happened?

We checked our post ranking on the second day to see if it has happened. We used the number one method in my, "How to Know If Google is Crawling and Ranking Your Posts". You can also use the same to check your post-ranking status.

We were all disappointed with the result. The post was nowhere to be found. We check all the results up to the last page, yet nothing. Imagine!

I couldn't understand how that happened. We expected, at worst, to find this post on the last page of the results. Yet, nothing!

Mind you, the website wasn't new. At least, it has been pushing for more than a year.

So, what has gone wrong?

The simple answer and observation were that Google had not even crawled the post not to talk of ranking it. This can happen once in a while. This is why you may need to wait a few weeks before you can conclude a post has not ranked. However, what happened, in this case, was not competition. It's just that Google has not crawled it at all.

I was surprised to see that content that was below average, by other authors, ranked well. But ours had been left NOWHERE.

Though Google had been factual that indexing could take a week or two, our experience, with this blog, had been consistently favorable for just one or two days.

We Forced Google to Crawl and Rank The Post

There is probably no post across the net that will teach you this one thing. What you will be seeing, if you search now, includes writing more content, updating old content, writing longer posts, submit posts for indexing. At the best, they'll ask you to use a few provided tools which they may claim Google officially recommends.

While all these are true, I'd used this one method only to force google to crawl my posts and rank them eventually.

The simple trick is to repost your content to the latest date.

Let's say you'd written the post a few days ago. The post date could be 7/10/2023. Open the post on your dashboard. Then, change the post date to the present day - let's say 10/10/2023 (the current day).

There is, though, a misconception that if you re-post your articles, Google sees them as fresh content. That's not true. But I'm sure, that helps you gain fresh bot crawling. Hence, if you were not ranked before, you could be now.

The post was republished after a week Google failed to rank it.

We republished the post in question. Needless to say, we checked the second day and it's not only on the first page but rightly the number 1 result overall.

This little tactic has won Google to re-crawl my posts and eventually rank them.

Conclusion

If you notice a post you wrote a couple of days or weeks ago has not been ranked at all. In other words, never present in the search results, republish it.

This may appear so simple - but it works all the time. My observation is Google can sometimes skip your post while crawling the first time. Help their bots to see the post with a new date. Then, expect the magic in a few days.

But before doing that, be sure the post truly deserves to be ranked higher or above the competition.

Have you done this before? What was the result? Do you intend to do the same? Share your experience. Leave a comment below.