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So, you’ve developed an amazing site. You’ve put together some seriously valuable content, iterated on the design, and gathered a ton of feedback. Now, you’re finally feeling ready to share it with the world.

And as soon as you publish your new site for the world to see, all of your content will immediately start showing up in Google, right?

Well, maybe. It takes a little more than just hitting the publish button. To get your site listed on search results, Google needs to “crawl” and “index” your content. This happens automatically over periods of days or weeks, but if you’re a site owner, you can manually submit your site to Google and accelerate this process.

There are two ways to do this. But first, let’s briefly explore how Google crawls and indexes your website content.

Googlebot, essentially begins with a list of web page URLs generated from previous crawls and then augments those pages with sitemap data provided within Google Search Console. During the crawling process, the Googlebot — also known as a “spider” — looks for new sites, updates to existing pages, and any broken links.

If new pages are within your sitemap, Google will discover them and crawl the content and then potentially list the page within search results based on its evaluation of 200+ criteria.

Once the crawling process is complete, all of the results are fed into Google’s index, and any new sites or updated content will be listed accordingly. During the processing of results, Google looks at information on your page such as title tags, meta description, alt tags, and more. If you have dynamic content on a page, the Googlebot may not be able to read it and will crawl the default version — it’s recommended that your default version is optimized for search.

As a result of Google’s crawling, you may never need to submit your website as it will be discovered automatically. The downside to this approach has always been that it’s reliant on Google’s timeframe to crawl and index your site content, which may not happen as quickly as you would like.

Want to check if a particular site is listed in Google? Just begin your search with “Site:Sitename.com.” For example, here’s what is displayed in Google for HubSpot.com:

If no content is indexed yet for a site, Google will let you know that your search did not match any results.

If no content is found, your next step should be to create a sitemap that can be submitted to Google.

If you want more information about how to create a sitemap, take a look at this post.

(HubSpot customers: Your sitemap is automatically generated and maintained. Simply go to yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml to see it.)

How Long Does It Take for Google to Index Content?

My former colleague Casey Henry wondered this very question and ran a test to see how long it took Yahoo! and Google to crawl and index content. The results? Well, they were staggering.

When publishing content without manually submitting an updated sitemap, Henry found that it took Google 1,375 minutes to crawl, while Yahoo took 1,773 minutes. To put those numbers into perspective, that’s roughly a full-day just to crawl your content.

Source: Moz

On the other hand, if you’re launching a new website, or adding a number of new pages to an existing domain, it may be worth submitting an updated sitemap. According to the same study, Henry found that after submitting an updated sitemap, the average time it took for a bot to visit the page was 14 minutes, compared to Yahoo!’s 245 minutes. In other words, your new page can start generating organic traffic and conversions on the same day.

Source: Moz

How Do I Submit My Site to Google?

To submit your website to Google, you can either add an updated sitemap to your Google account, or submit an indexing request for the desired URL through Fetch as Google. Both processes require site owners to register with Google Search Console.

Here are the specifics of each option:

If you have a brand new site …

If you’re launching a website for the first time, you should first verify you own the site within Google Search Console. Then, submit it here — select the “submit a sitemap” option once you land on this page.

If you have an existing site and are launching new pages …

With a web domain already launched, you can still submit new pages for Google to index and rank them accordingly. Anyone used to be able to do this with a page they wanted crawled, whether they owned the page or not. Now, just as you would when launching a brand new website, you must be the URL’s owner to ask Google to re-crawl it.

If you own a webpage you’d like Google to re-crawl, you can do a few different things:

Submit an Updated Sitemap

First, you can submit an updated sitemap to ensure it gets listed as quickly as possible. To submit an updated sitemap, log in to Google Search Console and select “Add a Property.”

Once you’re there, you can submit your updated sitemap for Google so it can begin crawling it as soon as possible.

Fetch as Google

Fetch as Google allows you to view webpages on your site as Google sees them. As a site owner, you can also use this tool to reindex individual URLs once you’ve fetched them. To do this, log into Google Search Console and select the property you have currently listed with Google.

Along the lefthand sidebar, select Crawl > Fetch as Google, as shown below:

This will pull up a table where you can enter a URL path following your domain name, and “Fetch” this particular webpage on your website. See what this looks like below:

As you can see above, two sample Fetch requests have been listed below the Fetch bar. The status of these fetches is “Partial,” but once these fetches are complete, Google will assess their eligibility for reindexing. If the URL you’ve fetched qualifies, you’ll see a “Request Indexing” option appear where the red box is in screenshot above. Select this option, and Google will begin the process of re-crawling and reindexing this webpage.

As stated earlier in this article, indexing requests can take anywhere from a day to a couple of weeks to complete. So, check your Fetch as Google table periodically to see the status of your active indexing requests.

Based on the above instructions, you may be wondering if you need to submit an updated sitemap or indexing request every time you publish a new page. If you’re updating critically important content that you’d like Google to recognize quickly, you certainly could do so. But keep in mind Google also re-crawls pages on its own, and it’s ok to let this process work in the background as you regularly create and update your content.

 

Facebook announced today that it has found evidence of another coordinated election interference campaign on its site — a likely effort to influence the 2018 U.S. Midterms.

This is the second instance of a high-profile effort to weaponize Facebook with the goal of influencing a U.S. election. Last year, it was discovered that foreign actors — largely based in Russia — coordinated a similar campaign with the creation of numerous fake accounts and the spread of divisive information, much of it false.

This time, things are a bit different. Facebook caught a smaller number of accounts, but did so much earlier on — and the company is less confidence about saying, for sure, who could be behind it.

Here’s what we know.

Facebook Uncovered Another Election Interference Campaign

What Facebook Found

In its official statement, the company said it removed 32 Pages and accounts — eight Facebook Pages, 17 Facebook profiles, and seven Instagram accounts —  for what it describes as “inauthentic behavior” that intends to mislead network users.

Altogether, Facebook said, more than 290,000 accounts followed one or more of the Pages removed.

Of the Pages, those with the highest following included “Aztlan Warriors,” “Black Elevation,” “Mindful Being,” and “Resisters.” The last one — Resisters — worked with five other authentic Pages to organize an event called “No Unite the Right 2 – DC,” which it created to protest a “Unite the Right” scheduled for this August in Washington, D.C.

The authentic Pages “unwittingly” played a vital role in organizing this event, Facebook says, going to far as providing attendees with help finding transportation and locations. More than 2,500 users said they were interested in attending, and over 600 RSVP’d “yes.”

Facebook says it plans to inform these users of what it has discovered this afternoon.

Source: Facebook

The events created by these Pages wasn’t limited to “No Unite The Right 2- DC.” Together, they created roughly 30 events since May 2017, with the largest having 1,400 users RSVPing “yes.”

Combined, these accounts created 9,500 organic posts, running roughly 150 ads across Facebook and Instagram that cost a total of $11,000. The most recent ad was created in June 2018 (and the first, the company says, in April 2017 — the same month Facebook published a white paper on the potential misuse of its platform.

As for the content of these ads, Facebook has released a small sample. There are some similarities between what was shared today and the Russian-bought content that was released by the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) in May.

Similar to the latter, the ads released today pertain to some of the most divisive issues in the U.S., many of which are center stage in the months leading up to a major election — things like race, gender rights, and religion. The U.S. 2018 Midterm Elections are taking place this November.

Source: Facebook

Who Was Behind It

Here’s where things start to get tricky.

When Facebook discovered and described the weaponization of its platform to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the evidence of Russian interference — specifically, the IRA — was clear, with the company able to track that activity to these parties.

This time, however, Facebook says that it cannot say with certainty who coordinated this campaign — and that while there are some similarities with what was discovered this time around and the previous Russian interference, “we still don’t have firm evidence to say with certainty who’s behind this effort.”

However, certain lawmakers disagree. Senator Mark Warren — whose office yesterday published a paper outlining what regulation of Big Tech might look like — showed no hesitation in identifying Facebook’s findings as “evidence” of Russian interference.

More evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation. https://t.co/OMidt7zfiv

— Mark Warner (@MarkWarner)
July 31, 2018

But Facebook’s investigation is ongoing, it says, and involves working with law enforcement and Congress. “The lack of firm attribution in this case or others,” wrote Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos, “does not suggest a lack of action.”

Facebook has made no secret of its efforts to curb the spread of misinformation and prevent election interference on its site since the 2016 election meddling was first discovered — which was followed by the discovery that personal user data was improperly obtained and abused by voter profiling firm Cambridge Analytica.

Since then, Facebook has made a suite of changes to the way it publishes and displays ads, from a major shift in its News Feed algorithm to show more content from friends and family, to special labels and options to learn more about issue-based ads. 

The Timing

The announcement follows a string of bad days for Facebook. Last week, its Q2 earnings call proved to be somewhat disastrous, as a miss on estimates and reported decrease in active users sent the company’s stock price into a tailspin.

An analyst asked for clarification on this, and what’s causing the deceleration. CFO David Wehner says that “a combination of factors” is driving it, like giving users more choices around privacy, as well as investments in new products and initiatives that can slow revenue growth https://t.co/JS4FC00P35

— Amanda Zantal-Wiener (@Amanda_ZW)
July 25, 2018

Facebook began to financially rebound — and as of publishing this story, its stock price does not appear to have been significantly impacted by today’s revelations.

Source: Google

The same day as the earnings call, it was revealed that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — along with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and a yet-to-be-disclosed representative from Google — will testify before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. 

Tomorrow, that will be preceded by an open hearing held by the same committee, where lawmakers will hear testimony from third-party experts on foreign influence in social media.

As Facebook has indicated, the investigation is ongoing and more information is expected to be revealed as it proceeds.