I cannot tell you how many notifications on email, social media and other methods around Google added a "recrawl now" button that leads to a video, it is a bug, it is weird, why is Google doing this to us! It was April Fools and so many SEOs thought Google gave SEOs a new "recrawl now" button but it linked to a video by accident.
It lead and linked to this classic video rickrolling every SEO who clicked on it:
Google posted about it the night before April Fools Day:
For normal crawling and indexing, just use a sitemap file. To submit individual URLs, use Fetch as Google. But if you just want to click "↻ recrawl," we're never gonna let you down.
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) March 31, 2018
➡️ https://t.co/uoaCWUIrap ⬅️ pic.twitter.com/OyyDZJ5z8V
Then this morning, admitted to the prank on Twitter:
Inside, we both know what's been going on. We know the game and ... we were gonna play it. 🎶🎵🎶
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) April 3, 2018
We hope you had fun with our April Fools link! Wishing you a great start into April!
Of course, this was to mess with SEOs over the past couple of months or so, we have been reporting on changes to the request indexing and submit URL Google tool because of abuse and spam. Those limits were set aggressively for quiet some time but as of this morning, SEOs are saying they can now submit URLs freely to Google again.
Enjoy it, move on and yes, Google got so many of you all!
I covered many other Google pranks on Search Engine Land.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
