Google slow to update home page?

[lee_sufc]

Back in early December, I made some changes to my site for SEO purposes. While keeping an eye on this over the past few weeks, I've noticed that the last time Google crawled my home page was the 4th December. The rest of the site has been re-crawled twice since then? Is there a particular reason for this or is it a case of holding tight and being patient to see the change?

[not2easy]

No need to be patient and hold tight, you can use "Fetch as Google" in GSC to show them new changes. That lets you "submit" updated pages and alerts them that something has changed. If you use their Fetch and Render option you can choose either desktop or mobile and they will let you know if there are any issues with the page before you click to submit it.

[aristotle]

No need to be patient and hold tight, you can use "Fetch as Google" in GSC to show them new changes. That lets you "submit" updated pages and alerts them that something has changed. If you use their Fetch and Render option you can choose either desktop or mobile and they will let you know if there are any issues with the page before you click to submit it.

That's correct. But you still might have to wait a few days after you do that before the new content is reflected in google's search results.

[seoskunk]

Check you haven't deleted robots.txt, you should see changes immediately on fetching the page in my experience.

[lee_sufc]

Cheers guys. Have fetched as Google in GWT. However, next to that it now says "request indexing" - as this page is already indexed, should I still press this?

[seoskunk]

Yes go for it

[lee_sufc]

One more question (promise!) The tool is asking:
Crawl only this URL
Crawl this URL and its direct links

Which one should I opt for - the rest of the site has recently be re-crawled - it's only the home page I've been waiting for. Just concerned that if I press the wrong button, it'll mess things up for my current rankings...I'm probably being too paranoid.

[not2easy]

I just choose "only this page" since it is already indexed and leads to others. They'll get there.

[Dimitri]

Google might have detected your change was for "SEO purpose", and didn't judged it worth updating it for the moment.