How do I ask Google to reindex all the webpages and posts of my website?

**Ryna Lagger** · 07-03-2016, 10:01 AM

You don't just care about XML sitemaps. In fact, forget about XML sitemaps for the moment, the first thing you need to do is set up 301 redirects.

If you don't do this, you're going to lose the SEO value of all those links pointing at your site. Plus, if you set up 301s, then the search engines (not just Google) will automatically find and reindex the new pages when they go looking for the old pages.

A 301 basically says to the search engines, "that old URL has changed to this new URL, so please index the new page and pass any link value from the old to the new URL."

Now, once you've done that, you can worry about the XML Sitemap.

First, find a tool that will create a sitemap for you

Next, set up a new Google Webmaster account for the site. (Don't forget to do one for Bing, too. Yahoo uses Bing results, so you don't need to worry about Yahoo.)

Follow the instructions to verify your ownership of the domain, and to submit the sitemap.

Also, to help search engines find your sitemap if they don't use a sitemap submission process, add this line to your robots.txt file: Sitemap: [path to sitemap]

You might also consider building an HTML sitemap, then using the Fetch as Google tool in Google Webmasters (and Submit URL tool within the Bing Webmasters account) to get Google to grab and index an HTML sitemap, from which, hopefully, it will follow links around your site.