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This question on Meta Stack Exchange asks whether crawler visits count towards the 'number of views' of a Stack Exchange question (that determines the 'people reached' statistic on your profile).

Google returns a lot of results about indexing URLs but they apply (solely?) when you're the administrator of the website. As a consumer, can I ask Google Search to index/crawl a specific URL, for instance a specific Stack Exchange question?

I'm looking for something like the Wayback Machine homepage where you can just submit a URL in a form.

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  • There use to be a help article about how to ask google to index content published by others (I posted it on the old official help forums a lot) but I can't find it. The closest that I found is Add an image to Google
    – Rubén ♦
    Aug 16, 2019 at 17:49
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    I think I just increased the viewcount by asking google to inspect the Structued data: search.google.com/structured-data/… but that is as close as I can get. Keep in mind that SE uses a robot.txt to send crawlers to the sitemap.xml.
    – rene
    Aug 16, 2019 at 17:52
  • Almost a year since this question was asked – have you found a solution, by any chance?
    – mhucka
    Aug 7, 2020 at 20:29
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    @mhucka no, sorry ...
    – Glorfindel
    Aug 7, 2020 at 20:30

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From the OP's question

As a consumer, can I ask Google Search to index/crawl a specific URL, for instance a specific Stack Exchange question?

There use to be a help article on the Google (Search) Help Center about how to ask google to add content to Google that pointed to another help article on the Webmasters Tools (now Search Console) Help Center that referred a tool to submit content's URL to be indexed and to request to update the cached version of an already indexed content. This tool could be used by site owners and "consumers".

Unfortunately, AFAIK, this tool isn't available anymore, so I think that the best bet for "consumers" to get some content to be indexed/crawled by Google is to contact the webmaster of the content that they want to be indexed/crawled.

Another alternative is to create a Google Programmable Search Engine.

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