Added description metatag for 7000 old articles resubmit site to GWT?

[born2run]

Hi I have about 7000 old articles all of which had a default description metatag. So I went ahead and had my programmer create description metatag dynamically using the teasers.

I want to know if I should resubmit the entire site to GWT for re-indexing? Thanks in advance!

[paulsimmons]

You just need to force crawler to re-crawl your website and index the changes. It can be done through webmasters Crawl - Fetch as Google bot and then submit to index.

[lucy24]

You may not even need to force a recrawl, unless you're in a great hurry. Once google has crawled a few random pages and discovered that page content has changed after being unchanged for a long time, gears will click and whirr in the computer, and everything else will get re-crawled too.

You should be cautioned, though, that the "description" meta is not, in and of itself, indexed. It is sometimes shown in search results, but you can't search for the index text itself. (I have personally experimented with this on a few pages with unusual wording in the description.)

[born2run]

Thanks for the advice guys!

[roshaoar]

Agree with Lucy24. Title is actually much more important for ranking etc, whereas description is really your 'call to action', so not searchable but matters in terms of urging people to click.

[born2run]

Thanks for the tips. Any clue how many days/weeks it typically takes to update these in SERPs?

[born2run]

Could anyone please answer approx. how many days it takes for Google to update their SERPs on the changed 7000 pages? Thanks in advance!

[joshualuther155]

It will happen immediately the crawlers hit your site

[tangor]

Thanks for the tips. Any clue how many days/weeks it typically takes to update these in SERPs?

Look to your logs for answer. How often does G crawl your site? Mine are crawled daily (different section each day.

Index update might take hours, days, rarely weeks.

[lucy24]

approx. how many days

That depends entirely on the site. If it's a site like WebmasterWorld which google loves, changes will show up in the index faster than a page can refresh. Otherwise it can take days for changes to percolate through the various data centers. That's days after the crawl, not days after the change. Only you know how often your pages get crawled.

[born2run]

Thanks as always Lucy!