: Googlebot takes a week to index my blog, how do I increase the rate? Right now I see it comes after 7 days. I am using a Wordpress plugin for SiteMap generator and just changed it's frequency

@Jessie594

How often Google indexes a site for new content is based on an algorithmic evaluation undertaken by Google. The same process is followed for both blogs as well as standard websites.

The first step is that Google will undertake an initial crawl of your site. This can be from Google finding a link on another site that links back to your site, or from you as a webmaster submitting a fetch as... form or uploading your sitemap to Google. Once this initial index has been undertaken, which can take anywhere from a few days to 2+ weeks Google will then regularly re-crawl and index your site. You can assist this process by uploading updated sitemaps to Google or doing a fetch as google form submission however this doesn't mean that the process will be sped up. The point of being able to control the frequency of a Google crawl isn't to increase how often it happens faster than Google does for your site as standard, rather it is to slow the indexing frequency down if Google attempts to index your site faster than you want and it is causing you issues. For most sites you should leave the crawl option set to let Google optimise the crawl for your site.

The fact that your WordPress site is being indexed every 7 days (as per your question) is not that unusual at all and is about average with some sites being indexed very frequently (Stack Exchange for instance has no content added to Google within minutes) and others being indexed infrequently (one site I managed was only indexed every 2 weeks due to not being a high authority site and not having a huge amount of new content added.

Only Google knows for certain how the algorithm makes the decision on the frequency of the crawl but the basics seem to be around how often new content is added to your site, how often existing content is edited, and the quality and authority of the content on your site in general.

As @Stephen Ostermiller advises you can use the ping service built into WordPress which is powered by Ping-O-Matic and that will assist the process as well but as @Simon Hayter points out as well this does not necessarily make a difference when it comes to Google as Google can and does ignore pings from low authority sites, especially new sites which don't have a track record of high authority as Google assesses.

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