IndexNow: Did you know that this feature can reduce the time it takes to index your content?

IndexNow - did you know that this feature can reduce the time it takes to index your content?

IndexNow: Did you know that this feature can reduce the time it takes to index your content?

In October of last year, Microsoft announced the launch of Index Now, a tool that allows you to significantly reduce the time it takes for content to be indexed in search engines.

Last year, Bing and Yandex already adopted the new protocol, but Google has also started testing this new tool.

Read this text to find out what IndexNow is and how to optimize content indexing with this new protocol.

What is IndexNow?

IndexNow is an evolutionary indexing protocol created by Microsoft and Yandex. According to the tool's own website, it is the easiest way for website owners to report the latest updates to search engines.

It is an open source ping for all participating search engines such as Bing, Yandex and Google.

When a site is deleted, updated or pages are added, IndexNow notifies all search engines so that this new data can be evaluated for a new search result, providing a shorter time for indexing and giving new ranking opportunities.

Why is IndexNow important for optimizing indexing times?

Search engines have two main functions: crawling and indexing. When they discover a page or news on it, they index it, based on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) guidelines, analyzing content, categories, tags, media and everything else on a page.

From there, it stores the best pages in its database and presents them whenever a user searches.

Given these two search engine functions, IndexNow is extremely interesting because before it, news from a website or blog could take days or even weeks before being discovered and indexed by search engines. 

This problem could even occur with large, high-traffic websites or e-commerce sites, for which it could take up to weeks for search engines to crawl the site and index new pages.

While the new pages are not indexed, the site may lose important traffic to its competitors.

With IndexNow, discovery is immediate and there is soon an opportunity to check whether updates to a website or blog are in line with SEO guidelines, required, for example, by new Google algorithm updates, such as Core Web Vitals, which is a set of indicators that evaluate the user experience, or the Core update, which focused more on EAT (expertise, authority and credibility).

Will Google adopt IndexNow?

Will Google adopt IndexNow?
Will Google adopt IndexNow?

While there is still no set deadline for when Google will end its testing of IndexNow, this information suggests that there is some reason to believe that the search engine giant is recognizing the capabilities of the new protocol.

Google is thoroughly testing IndewNow on sustainability and efficiency criteria because it wants to make tracking even better.

Google currently uses the HTTP/2 data transfer protocol, which is already significantly more efficient than its predecessors.

How does IndexNow work?

What makes IndexNow quite innovative is that it allows all URLs submitted to any search engine enabled for it to be submitted simultaneously, whether when the search engine visits the site to request pages and collect data from the server or when the management system notifies the addition or deletion of pages.

To notify search engines with IndexNow, you need to follow a few steps:

  • ensure ownership of the domain. This key can be generated on the Bing website;
  • Use a host API key, hosted in the root directory in txt format.
  • Send URLs with parameters;
  • You can check which URLs were submitted and crawled by the Bing Webmaster Tools portal.

Any website developer can use this process, and it is not even necessary to understand HTML or HDMI. That is why several large companies have already announced that they are planning to migrate to IndexNow, such as Linkedin and MSN. In addition, WordPress already offers an IndexNow plugin.

These companies seem to be seeing advantages in using IndexNow, mainly in terms of eliminating time between updates being made and the process of crawling (discovering) and indexing pages.

By allowing webmasters to notify all participating URLs with a single API call, the discovery process is greatly simplified, making the web more open, transparent, and efficient.

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