Roundup: how fast new pages get found

Roundup: how fast new pages get found

Discovery latency, measured in logs.

→ Publisher case (Merj) — timestamped the first Googlebot hit on every new article; median discovery was 14 minutes via the homepage feed, but 9 hours for pages only in the XML sitemap.
Takeaway: a link in a frequently-crawled page beats the sitemap for speed.

⭐ Pick of the week — Builtvisible discovery audit — A/B tested adding new URLs to a hub page vs sitemap-only; hub-linked pages were crawled 6x faster, proven across 400 URLs in the log.
Takeaway: design a fast discovery path, then measure it.

→ Google sitemaps best-practice doc — what sitemaps are and aren't good for.
Takeaway: sitemaps aid coverage, not speed.