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Google Discourages Force Indexing Your Pages To Search w/ Manual Crawl Requests
Posted by on February 20, 2026 at 1:58 pmGoogle's u/johnmu said that he discourages large sites from force indexing its pages to Google Search. He said on a comment on LinkedIn, "I strongly recommend not relying on trying to force indexing."
It is not a new question, we covered this at least twice before. In 2020, Google said sites that need to request manual indexing may have quality issues. And more recently we covered Google saying you don't need to reindex your pages using Google Search Console.
Similar here, John was asked by Rehman Ameen:
These are definitely some interesting strategic workarounds to consider for manual indexing issues.
John Mueller replied:
I strongly recommend not relying on trying to force indexing – it doesn't make sense for any reasonably large site. Use the existing mechanisms, use merchant center if you're selling products.
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1 Reply
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if you write it and someone scrapes it then they crawl the scraped one first then you are f’d when you could have requested index and then they know it is yours and you wrote it first! disagree with Mu!
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Manual crawl requests are basically a copium button for sites with garbage internal linking and messy sitemaps. If Google needs you to babysit indexing at scale, your crawl budget is already screwed. Fix the boring stuff: clean XML sitemaps, stop pumping out thin tag pages, tighten canonicals, and make sure new URLs are actually discoverable from nav or hubs. Also John name-dropping Merchant Center is the tell: if youre ecommerce and not feeding products there, youre doing it wrong and wondering why “request indexing” doesnt work.
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I’ve long been against requesting indexing in GSC. I feel like you are training Google’s spiders that they don’t have to crawl your site as often.
You will notify them when there is new content, so why waste the resources coming back on their own to look for new content?
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