Over the holidays, Microsoft released a brand new tool for WordPress users called IndexNow. This plugin automatically submits your website’s URLs to search engines. Once installed, the plugin will detect every time you create, update or delete a page on your website and then it shares that information with the search engines. This means the internet will always have the
latest information about your website.
IndexNow Basics
IndexNow allows websites owners to instantly inform search engines about the latest content changes on their website. Once search engines are notified of updates, they crawl and update their index and search results. Anytime you add a new page, delete an old page or update a current page, search engines will be informed and act instantly. Bing and Yandex are currently participating, and Google is reportedly testing the protocol out.
There are two ways pages are indexed in search engines: pushing and pulling. Pulling is the standard way. It’s when a search engine crawler visits a website and then pulls the data from that server. IndexNow is innovative because it brings a new way to index your information by automatically pushing it to search engines every time you make a change. This is great for
website owners because you no longer have to wait for crawlers to find and update your content.
There are customization options for this, too. You can configure which content changes trigger IndexNow to act, including changes in your: Title, Meta Description, and Headers.
Microsoft said in a recent announcement:
“Historically, one of the biggest pain points for website owners has been to have search engines quickly discover and consider their latest website changes. It can take days or even weeks for new URLs to be discovered and indexed in search engines, resulting in loss of potential traffic, customers, and even sales. Once search engines are notified of updates they quickly crawl and reflect website changes in their index and search results.”
Microsoft has also announced that giant companies including eBay, LinkedIn, and MSN plan to switch to IndexNow from the Bing API. It’s no doubt that other large companies will follow suit, and small companies should consider switching too.
How To Use IndexNow
- Generate a key supported by the protocol using our online key generation tool.
- Host the key in text file named with the value of the key at the root of your website.
- Start submitting URLs when your URLs are added, updated, or deleted.
You can submit one URL or a set of URLs per API call. Indexing is essential for optimized SEO. Search engines need to have the most updated information about your website and content. IndexNow is making significant waves in how search engines work. Using this protocol is extremely simple, but it also requires little effort to install. You’ll want to get in early because soon enough, all the major search engines will be adopting this new method
