I just pushed a new redesign for our corporate website CHG Healthcare and less than an hour later found out that the new pages that never existed before were already indexed by Google and were showing up in the rankings.
I had not yet added the new pages to my sitemap.xml. I had not yet created 301 redirects from the old content.
Not only that, but a quick look into Google’s Webmaster tools told me that the last time the spiders had been there was 4 days ago.
So how did Google know to index these new pages? My suspicion is Google Chrome. I suppose someone somewhere (probably those of us inside the company testing the pages) accessed the new site with Google Chrome and that somehow triggered Google’s indexing service to grab the new content. While this might seem a bit scary to the Chrome user, it makes my job a lot easier of getting new content indexed and I welcome the notion.
That is, assuming my hunch is correct. Anyone heard if Chrome is doing this? What about the Google Toolbar?