According to Fabrice Canel, Search Engine Land’s Microsoft representative, 7 percent of all new URLs clicked on URLs via Bing Search over the past month were sourced through the IndexNow protocol. IndexNow has seen a lot of growth, with over 16 million websites using IndexNow. They are publishing more than 1.2 billion URLs daily to the IndexNow API.
IndexNow’s growth. IndexNow’s growth. IndexNow now supports millions of sites. Google announced that it would be testing a simple WordPress plugin for IndexNow. In February 2022, Microsoft announced that IndexNow was used for URL submission by 80,000 websites. In March 2022, SEOPress added integration to the platform, increasing its reach to 200,000 sites. Yoast SEO provided support in June that made it easy for many WordPress sites to activate the feature. These providers integrated IndexNow and millions of sites adopted IndexNow within a few months of its initial launch. We now have over 16 million websites using IndexNow.
IndexNow was adopted by Seznam.cz, a Czech search engine.
What’s IndexNow? IndexNow allows website owners to instantly notify search engines about any changes to their website’s content. IndexNow is a simple protocol that allows search engines to instantly know if a URL has been updated, deleted, or added. This allows search engines to quickly reflect the changes in their search results. IndexNow’s co-sharing went live in January 2022.
Integrations. Why Microsoft created its own plugin for WordPress sites that use IndexNow. Yoast added it to its premium plugin. Why did Yoast include it now? “The protocol’s most recent change is the second major development that has made us reconsider our views on IndexNow. The IndexNow team has changed the endpoint of API to stop pinging each search engine supported by it, and instead ping one API managed by the protocol. This makes it much easier for sites to only ping one site. This all fits in our view of a sustainable crawling/indexing solution, so now is a good time to implement IndexNow and a new integration into Yoast SEO,” explained the company.
Google support No, not yet. Google stated last year that it was testing IndexNow, but has not made any public statements about IndexNow since. Although there were rumors that Google wouldn’t adopt this protocol, we know from experience that things change quickly in the search space.
Why we matter. Instant indexing is an SEO’s dream. It allows search engines to find the most recent content on a website. This protocol is simple and requires very little developer effort. If you are interested in speedy indexing, this is a good option.
Microsoft also stated that it is “working to leverage IndexNow signal to further optimize our crawl engine learning stack.” In the Fall, Microsoft said it expected to “crawl websites with an explicit content change signal even faster” and provide more efficient updates.
Search Engine Land’s first article, IndexNow to blame for 7% of all URLs clicked in Bing over the past month, appeared first on Search Engine Land.
