When some content gets added, updated, or deleted, IndexNow informs participating search engines via pinging so that the search engines can crawl the URL on priority and reflect the changes quickly in their search results. It is supported by Microsoft Bing, Seznam cz, & Yandex which offers an easy way to instantly inform the participating search engines about the latest content changes on the websites.
IndexNow uses a simple ping to notify the search engines that a URL and its content have been added, updated, or deleted.
How Search Engine Indexing Works
A search engine uses discovery tools to send out bots to crawl links from the website to website and create a content map called an index. There are two different ways search engines obtain index data: Pull and push. Pull indexing occurs when a search engine visits your site to request web pages and gathers data from the server. Search engines have been discovering & indexing content in this way for a long time. Push indexing is when the website notifies the search engine that pages have been added or deleted or other changes have been made. That’s how IndexNow supposes to work by pinging the website changes to any IndexNow participating search engines simultaneously.
Many experts in SEO community don’t see claiming that the XML sitemaps already accomplishing what IndexNow is trying to accomplish.
How IndexNow is Different?
Currently, all search engines use XML sitemaps to discover new content and updates on the websites. When a search engine bot visits a sitemap, it attempts to crawl every single link that it finds on the sitemap as well as every single link that’s inside of each page. This is a resource-intensive process and sometimes takes days to weeks for search engines to discover new content updates because they visit your website at random intervals. IndexNow protocol aims to solve that by allowing the website to automatically ping the search engine when a new post gets published or updated an existing piece of content. In this way, the search engine bots can crawl and update only those page which is being pinged, instead of randomly crawling every single page on the website to see what’s been updated.
It is said that IndexNow is a win-win situation for all; website owners, search engines, and the world.
Adding IndexNow in WordPress
Adding IndexNow to WordPress powered website is very convenient through the official plugin by Microsoft Bing.
- Search and install the IndexNow official plugin.
- Activate the IndexNow plugin.
- After activation visit Settings » IndexNow in the WordPress dashboard.
- On the IndexNow dashboard, click on the Get Started now button and then everything will automatically get configured. After that, you will see a screen with IndexNow statuses like successful URL submissions and more.
That’s all, you have successfully enabled IndexNow to your WordPress website.
