Why modifications to your Shopify store don't appear in Google right away

With Shopify, WordPress, and most modern web software systems you can make a change in their admin panel and see the change happen almost immediately on your site.

Change a page title, save it, and it’s updated right away. Some platforms like Shopify cache (save a version) of the website and may take a few minutes to update. But it’s relatively quick.

So it may be frustrating when you make a change on your website and Google, one of the top technology companies around, doesn’t update things right away.

It would be nice if Google updated your search listings immediately right? Alas, there is a delay between when you make a change on Shopify, when Google sees the change, and when they update the search listings.

Many of us know that Google crawls websites to see what exists. There isn’t a master database on all web pages or content. So Google has to constantly look for new and updated pages. Their computers are crawling billions of pages on the web and use an algorithm to determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to look at for each site.

Let’s say you have a thousand pages that all get updated at the same time (thanks to Shopify’s templates). Just because you update all those pages, doesn’t mean Google looks at every page. They may only look at a handful of them based on their algorithm. The others wait to be updated for the next crawl. Despite what you may think, resubmitting your sitemap doesn’t make this process faster.

How often Google checks on your site depends on a lot of factors including how frequently it’s been updated in the past, how popular it is, how many sites link to it, etc, etc.

If your site is very popular, like Nike.com then it might display a change in minutes or hours. If your site isn’t as popular, it could be days or weeks, or even months before Google updates your search listings.

When making changes to your site, you’ll likely need to wait for a while before you see the changes reflected in search results.

It’s a slow and annoying process but everyone has to go through it.

Structured data for Rich Results works the same way. Even if you install JSON-LD for SEO in the next hour, it could take weeks before Google has updated your search listings.

So if you’re planning for something big, something like Black Friday, keep these potential delays in mind. If SEO is a part of your holiday strategy, don’t delay.