7-percent of all the new URLs clicked on URLs in Bing Search in the past month were sourced from the IndexNow protocol, Fabrice Canel from Microsoft told Search Engine Land. In fact, IndexNow has grown a lot, with more than 16 million websites that are using IndexNow, they are publishing over 1.2 billion URLs per day to the IndexNow API.
IndexNow’s growth. In February 2022 IndexNow has grown to support millions of sites by adding integration with Duda, All in One WordPress SEO plugin and Rank Math SEO plugin. Microsoft released a simple-to-use WordPress plugin for IndexNow and Google announced it would be testing this protocol. Then in February 2022, Microsoft said 80,000 websites are now using IndexNow for URL submission.In March 2022 SEOPress added integration building the platform by another 200,000 sites. In June, Yoast SEO added support providing easy access for a lot of WordPress sites to turn on the feature. With those providers integrating IndexNow, it gained millions of sites adopting IndexNow, just several months after IndexNow was initially rolled out. Now, we are at over 16 million websites that are using IndexNow.
Earlier this year, the Czech search engine Seznam.cz adopted IndexNow.
What is IndexNow. IndexNow provides a method for website owners to instantly inform search engines about the latest content changes on their website. IndexNow is a simple ping protocol so that search engines know that a URL and its content has been added, updated, or deleted, allowing search engines to quickly reflect this change in their search results. The co-sharing of IndexNow went fully live in January 2022.
Integrations. Why Microsoft built its own plugin for WordPress sites to use IndexNow, Yoast decided to build it in to its premium plugin. Why did Yoast add it now? “The latest change to the protocol is the second significant development that made us change our minds about IndexNow. The IndexNow team changed the endpoint of the API from pinging each individual-supported search engine to a single API managed by the protocol. This means that sites only have to ping a single site, making the process much more efficient. All of this fits into our view of a sustainable crawling and indexing solution, so now is the time to implement IndexNow with a new integration in Yoast SEO,” the company explained.
Google support? Nope, not yet. Google last year said it was testing IndexNow but since then has not said much about IndexNow. There have been some rumors that Google would not adopt this protocol but as we have seen in the search space, things change fast and often.
Why we care. Like we said before, instant indexing is an SEO’s dream when it comes to giving search engines the most updated content on a site. The protocol is very simple and it requires very little developer effort to add this to your site, so it makes sense to implement this if you care about speedy indexing.
Plus Microsoft said the company is “working to leverage IndexNow signals to further optimize our crawl machine learning stack.” By the Fall Microsoft said it expects to “crawl websites that have adopted IndexNow with a clear content change signal even more efficiently, resulting in faster updates and less crawl.”
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About The Author
Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.
