Are you tired of waiting days and days for your content to be discovered by search engines? There is finally a tool that can help you index your website content much faster.
IndexNow is a newly evolved protocol active since November 2021 that promises to make indexing content on the Web much faster. It is an open source protocol open to all search engines that would like to make use of it.
It is a signal that allows associated search engines to prioritize content crawling on new items or changes made, thus operating more efficiently.
This immediate indexing technology is currently supported at Microsoft and Yandex. Microsoft urges content creators to implement this mode to speed up the crawling of items and reduce the efforts of crawlers to discover new content. Other entities such as Wix and Duda plan to implement this model
How does IndexNow work?
IndexNow works like a ping that notifies search engines that a piece of content has been produced, updated, or deleted.
Also of note is that the single notification is received by all associated search engines, thus making it immediate to inform all of them of the change.
This is a useful tool both for content creators-who can notify search engines of new content that has been produced-and for search engines to focus their resources only on what actually needs to be indexed.
IndexNow allows users to generate a key in a text file (named with the key value) in the root of the site and begin sending URLs as they are added or removed. Microsoft makes it known that sending the URL consists of nothing more than an HTTP request containing the new URL and key.
To use IndexNow just follow these simple steps:
- Generate a key with the online generation tool
- Include the key in a text file in the root of the site
- Submitting URLs when they are added, changed or removed
Submitting consists of sending a simple HTTP request through
- https://www.bing.com/IndexNow?url=url-changed&key=your-key for Bing
- https://yandex.com/indexnow?url=url-changed&key=your-key for Yandex
One or more URLs can be submitted per API call. As a mode therefore it presents itself from the use particularly intuitive and affordable. In this case then the contributors have an active role of making sure that their content is indexed, rather than simply relying on “passive” crawling. There is a limit of 10,000 URLs per day that can be crawled.
Advantages of IndexNow
- Fast and free procedure for indexing new content
- Allows users to speed up indexing of content
- Allows search engines to save crawling resources
- Reduces crawl requests to websites
- Provide users with fresh content
- Webmasters need only report once, as the call is shared to all associated search engines
IndexNow: why to use it
IndexNow is a real godsend for those who need to speed up, compared to the usual time, the crawling of their content.
Resorting to Indexnow however is not of itself a guarantee that web pages will actually be indexed.
From Google’s point of view, however, it is a superfluous tool, as Big G claims that it is perfectly capable of coping with indexing requests and that it has reduced the time it takes to discover new content However, webmasters testify that delays in getting their content stored are not uncommon.
In November, however, Google let it be known that it will test the protocol applied by Bing and Yandex.
Microsoft Bing recently released a plugin that makes it easier to make use of this protocol. The plugin automatically reveals and flags URLs.
Meanwhile, IndexNow is catching on; more than 60,000 sites are making use of it.
This tool will probably gain even more utility in the future as new platforms join its use. CMSs will therefore progressively implement a native ping system via this procedure to make its use more intuitive.
We will see if this method becomes a standard shared by all search engines or if it is discarded in favor of some other solution.
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