Don’t be fooled by Google’s clever April Fools’ joke, disguised as a new Search Console feature.
Over the weekend Google announced on Twitter that a new “Recrawl” button had been added to Search Console.
Technically, that was true. However, if you were to actually test the button, you’d quickly find out Google just punked the SEO community.
For normal crawling and indexing, just use a sitemap file. To submit individual URLs, use Fetch as Google. But if you just want to click "↻ recrawl," we're never gonna let you down.
➡️ https://t.co/uoaCWUIrap ⬅️ pic.twitter.com/OyyDZJ5z8V— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) March 31, 2018
Google even left a clue in its tweet saying “we’re never gonna let you down.” Those are lyrics from Rick Astley’s song Never Gonna Give You Up.
That’s exactly where you’d end up if you clicked the “Recrawl” button— watching the YouTube video of Astley’s smash hit. In other words, Google managed to Rick Roll everyone.
Reading some of the replies to Google’s tweet, it’s clear that many SEOs were duped by the Recrawl button. Some publications are even reporting on this as being an actual feature, not realizing it was just a joke.
Lesson learned— if it seems to good to be true, it probably is. A button that would recrawl a site on demand? Not even Google can pull that off. To learn why, see our recent article on how often Google reindexes a site.
