Google uses little automated applications called robots (bots for short), affectionately known as spiders or crawlers. These robots crawl the web in search of new posts or pages. Just because your draft isn’t published, it doesn’t mean that it will not be indexed by Google. Within a few months, Google will find and index a new page or post on your site, even if it’s saved as a draft.
If it happens that Google somehow already indexed your website but with the wrong content, you’ll just need to wait until these Google bots re-index the website again. Sometimes this can take months, and there’s, unfortunately, nothing we can do on our end to speed up this process.
Here are a few articles that delve more in-depth on how Google indexes websites:
https://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/crawling-indexing.html
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/get-google-to-index/
https://www.blogaid.net/dont-leave-drafts-on-your-site-too-long/
Ask Google to Re-crawl your URLs
In case you recently edited or added new content to your website, you do have the option to ask Google directly to send their bots to your site once again and re-index the website with the new changes.
To ask Google to re-crawl your URLs, you should do the following:
Step 1 － Register on the Google Search Console → https://search.google.com/search-console/about
Step 2 － Enter your website’s URL.
Step 3 － You should input the link to the specific page you need Google to re-index at the top of the page, in the Inspect any URL in… field.
After this you’ll be provided with some feedback from Google – this usually doesn’t take longer than 2 minutes.
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After Google obtains all the info it requires about the page in question, you’ll get a complete report which contains the last crawl date, the crawled version, sitemap coverage, history, mobile version, and issues with the page Google might find.
If the page is not indexed or perhaps the indexed version is an older version of the page, you can click the Request Indexing button located at the bottom right of the report.
- Wait for Google to index your page once again.
This can last from several seconds up to 10 minutes. You should clear your cache or use the Incognito mode in your browser to check the indexing results.
Please note that re-indexing your page which contains new or edited content may affect its search rankings on Google – either in a positive or a negative way.
How to Submit your Sitemap to Google Search Console
Here’s how you can go about submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console:
Step 1 － Register or log in to the Google Search Console.
Step 2 － Choose your website by clicking on the search.
Step 3 － Choose Sitemaps from the menu located to the left.
Step 4 － Remove outdated or invalid sitemaps (if any) like sitemap.xml
Step 5 － Enter sitemap_index.xml in the Add a new sitemap field to complete the sitemap URL.
A domain property will not show the domain for the field. Please use the full sitemap URL.
