If you’ve rebuilt your website, or even just made major structural changes that you think will help in search engine optimisation, do you have to tell Google? The answer, according to a recent Q&A, is no.
Many of us use the feature in Google Search Console which allows individual pages to be ‘submitted’ to Google for indexing, rather than waiting for them to be picked up on the usual scheduled visits from the search engine’s crawlers. Can we not submit a whole site?
Triggering some sort of re-evaluation shouldn’t be necessary, according to the advice. If there’s a huge change, Google will need to ‘re-think’ the site, but it’ll do that as soon as it realises the site is nothing like the one it saw last time.
The problem I’ve often seen in the past is a site being launched, or restructured/redesigned, without search engine optimisation best practices having been implemented. This may be because this was seen as a job to do later, or because the web designer simply wasn’t particularly aware of SEO. I can’t imagine that it’s going to result in great ranking to offer Google a new site which is poor from an SEO point of view, and then a little while later, an ‘improved’ version where the SEO has been put in place. Always get any new site evaluated professionally from an SEO point of view before exposing it to the world.