Business tips for photographers: Fetch as Google Tool

It’s well documented that good, interesting, shareable content is a great way to drive your overall SEO position in today’s crowded professional photography market.  One tool that can be underutilised is Google Webmasters ‘Fetch as Google’ which gives YOU the power to submit new pages and blog posts and to tell Google to go and read it. Often we publish new web pages and blog posts and wait for them to show up in Google search results, but if your site it still rising up the SEO rankings, this can take weeks or even months to appear. Below is a step by step guide on how to ‘Fetch as Google’

Step 1: Log in to your Google Webmaster Account 

If you don’t have a Google Webmaster Account the first thing you need to do is set one up and go through the Verification process. This is to ensure that you are the site owner. You have 5 choices of how to verify your account ranging from an HTML file upload to using your Google Analytics tracking code.  I found it easiest to use the first option which includes downloading a verification code which you add to your website. For help with verifying your photography website, you can visit this help page here.

 

Step 2: Crawl > Fetch as Google 

Click on Crawl on the menu on the left-hand side and then click on Fetch as Google. Next, enter your web page or blog link into the input field, (leaving off the www address) and click the FETCH button.

 

Fetch as google instructions
Fetch as Google how does it work

  • Step 3: Submit to index

Once you have pressed fetch, wait to see if you have a green tick and success message. Once you see this you can then submit your page to be indexed using the Submit to index button.

At this point, you have 2 choices

  1. You can submit just that one page or blog post OR
  2.  You can submit that page or blog post plus all of its direct links.

If you have made major changes, or the new page or blog links to other pages on your site, then I would use the second option but please note you can only choose this option 10 times a month.

Fetch as Google how does it work

  • Step 4: Share, Share, Share! 

The final step is now to go and share your lovely new page or blog post across all social media. You want your hard work to reach as many people as possible so consider Facebook, Google +, Instagram, Twitter and any other media where you may reach your target audience.

  • HELP! I have followed your steps and it’s not working! 

If you have followed these steps and the result says “Redirected” and not “complete” here’s what you need to do. Thanks to Andy Dane for his technical support on how to resolve this issue.

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Andy Says “This is a simple fix, and it’s down to the way that Google sees websites. As far as Google is concerned, the HTTP version of your site is different to the HTTPS version of your site. Also, the www.domain.com version of your site is different to domain.com.
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When you get this error, it means that you have redirected traffic from one of these to the other. This is, in fact, the right things to do as you only want one version of your site to be reached! However, when you do this, you also need to change which version of your site you are using in Google Search console.
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As you can see in the screenshots below, it’s showing “redirection” when my site is https://andydanephotography.co.uk because I’ve redirected all traffic to https://www.andydanephotography.co.uk/.  So simply head back to your Search Console Dashboard, add the additional version of your site and it’s Sitemaps, and do your fetch from there”
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If you are unable to resolve this yourself, you can contact Andy here.
Fetch as google
Fetch as google
Fetch as google

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