One SEO professional asked John Mueller about linked pages closer to the home page–will these pages be indexed faster than pages that are far away from the home page?
John explained that yes, this is true – it depends a bit on the individual website, but for most websites, the home page is that central place where everything kind of rotates around.
For other websites, it might be that you have one specific category for which the company is known.
And then almost like that category page, or that main product page is the central point of the site.
But for most websites, the home page is usually that central point.
This happens at approximately the 15:44 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 4 15:44
Okay, good. So the pages [that] are linked closer to the homepage will index faster than pages like far away from the homepage, is that right?
John 15:58
In most cases, that’ll be true. It depends a little bit on the individual website. For most websites, the homepage is kind of that central place where everything kind of rotates around. For other other websites, it might be that you have one specific category for which the company is known.
And then almost like that category page, or that main product page is more like the, I don’t know, the central point of the website. But for most websites, the homepage is usually that central place.
SEO Professional 4 16:34
Okay, so I raised this question, because we found that many of our category pages didn’t like didn’t get indexed faster than other specific pages, like product pages. And these category pages, they have, they are at a formal place, like they…they are closer to the homepage. So we’re just wondering if this theory is right, correct.
John 17:07
Yeah, I think the difficult part there is also that, links closer from the homepage is kind of a general rule of thumb. But it doesn’t have to be the case. Because we have a lot of systems also in play to try to figure out how often we should recrawl a page.
And that depends on various factors. It also depends on how, how well it’s linked within the website. But also, based on what we expect will happen with this page, how often do we think it will change? Or how often do we think it will change significantly enough that it’s worthwhile to recrawl and reindex it?
And that might also be playing a role here. I don’t think with e-commerce sites, that would be common, but it could happen, that we kind of say, well, category pages tend to link to a lot of product pages, and maybe the price changes are more visible on the product page. So we go to the product page faster.
