Rob Young at Search Engine Watch reports on a new feature that Google released that speeds up your ability to have Google index your site. This is especially important in two key scenarios:

1. If you have time sensitive content you needed indexed.
2. If you need to clear the cached version of your site.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/08/submit-urls-to-google-with-fetch-as.html

This tool is part of Google Webmaster Tools (GWT). If you are not using the free GWT (including the landing page optimization features), you’re missing out on several opportunities to improve your sites performance.