(SEO This Week) – Back in October of 2020 Microsoft announced a new indexing protocol partnership and technology with Yandex called IndexNow. This was a single protocol/service that webmasters could submit their URLs to and get indexed in both of those particular search engines.
Announcing IndexNow https://t.co/X0j4UiMtV5 a new protocol already supported by Microsoft Bing and Yandex. With IndexNow, search engines can crawl more efficiently by helping website owners to quickly reflect website changes in search engines results and more customers to visit. pic.twitter.com/Eiw1Od8uhD
— Microsoft Bing Webmaster Team (@BingWMC) October 18, 2021
It wasn’t long after that Google announced that they were “looking into” the new protocol for future implementation, however, since they already have the Google Indexing API, it’s not expected to adopt IndexNow. At the very least, even if they use it, I wouldn’t expect them to make much of a fuss about doing so.
There are instructions on how to submit to the API that is reasonably simple, however, Cloudflare has an integration that they created very early on after the launch announcement. However, it has yet to be tested to see if their integration is really helping to index.
The IndexNow API itself also needs to be tested to learn about its indexing rate and time to index after submission numbers.
Assuming those tests result in some positive numbers, IndexNow could be a game-changer for business owners because they can potentially increase their reach while working towards being less dependent on Google for website traffic.
That all being said, the Bing team has announced that there is now a WordPress plugin to help people take advantage of the new service.
Announcing IndexNow Plugin for WordPress https://t.co/n1hHygJTVQ an easy free way for WordPress websites owners to instantly inform search engines about latest content changes on their website and get these changes quickly reflected in search engines. pic.twitter.com/z762weYWeE
— Microsoft Bing Webmaster Team (@BingWMC) December 21, 2021
There are conversations around talking about future integration with more technologies. Considering how simplistic the implementation seems to be based on the documentation it is expected to be available to more services considerably faster than Google’s Indexing API.
Plus it doesn’t have the restrictions Google’s API currently has, which is limited to Job Postings and Broadcast Events.
So, while proper testing needs to be done to see how good this new API is at getting pages indexed, with as simple as implementation is, there is no point in not using it.
