In the past you have informed Search Engines about all the pages on your website that you would like displayed in search results by:1) Generating a "
sitemap.xml" file listing every canonical URL and uploading that file to your server.
2) Add a reference to the location of your "
sitemap.xml" file in the "
robots.txt" file located on your server.
3) Login to both your Google and Bing Search Consoles and submit the new updated Sitemap, OR
use the Ping tool to submit that Sitemap.
So what has been the problem with that?Unless you are a large high traffic website, it may be
days or even weeks before a search engine recrawls your site, indexes new pages and removes those that have been deleted. Google say
requesting a recrawl multiple times for the same URL or sitemap won't get it crawled any faster. Because there are literally billions of websites today, the technical workload being placed upon Searchbot Web Crawlers is actually becoming unsustainable.
What is IndexNow?IndexNow is an easy way for website owners to
instantly inform search engines about latest content changes on their website. In it's simplest form, IndexNow is
a simple ping so that search engines know that a URL and its content has been added, updated, or deleted, allowing search engines to quickly reflect those change in their search results.
With IndexNow, search engines know immediately the URLs that have changed, helping them
prioritize crawl for these URLs and thereby limiting organic crawling to discover new content. This new indexing method is already supported by
Microsoft Bing, Seznam.cz and Yandex.
An API key is needed to match the ownership of your domain, along with submitted URLs. That unique API key is uploaded to your website root directory in txt format. This will help in verifying the ownership of the submitted URLs, thus eliminating anonymous spam submissions.
On 13th May 2022 Microsoft Bing removed the option to use the
anonymous Sitemap Ping submission method because "
it was often subject to misuse by spammers".
How do you implement IndexNow?Read the
Bing Webmaster page here >>Visit IndexNow.org and
read the Documentation and FAQ pages here >>Watch the
YouTube video here >>That video recommends an SEO Plugin name
RankMath (which I have not personally looked into.)
There is already a
WordPress Plugin for IndexNow here >>Will Google support IndexNow?At this point in time,
the answer is no, not yet. However, Google has shown interest in adding support for IndexNow. In their own words “
We are currently experimenting with this protocol in an internal environment.”
Personally, because IndexNow will pass website content changes to
all search engines instantly and prioritize searchbot web crawler activity, I suspect it will soon become the new standard method adopted by all. What do you think?
Gary
IndexNow: new way to ping sitemap changes, or not?
Posted - 05/15/2022 : 22:10:12
