Microsoft made a few announcements this week on the Bing webmaster blog around more software providers adding support for IndexNow leading to millions of sites using IndexNow since its launch in October 2021. Part of these announces have that Duda, All in One WordPress SEO plugin and Rank Math SEO plugin all added IndexNow integration into their systems.
What is IndexNow. IndexNow provides a method for websites owners to instantly inform search engines about 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 last month in January 2022.
Millions of sites using IndexNow. Last November, Cloudflare announced it added integration with IndexNow and 60,000 websites turned on that feature. Microsoft released a simple to use WordPress plugin for IndexNow and Google announced it would be testing this protocol. Then last month, Microsoft said 80,000 websites are now using IndexNow for URL submission. We are now up to millions of sites adopting IndexNow, just several months after IndexNow was initially rolled out.
New adoption. In these three announcements, we had the number 20 CMS platform on the internet, Duda announce they have enabled IndexNow by default across nearly 1 million active websites. The All In One WordPress SEO plugin announced it added support for IndexNow to the over 2 million sites that use its plugin. To activate and use IndexNow with AIOSEO, users can head over to the Feature Manager tab in the AIOSEO dashboard, where they’ll find the option to activate the addon. Then Rank Math SEO plugin announced it added support to the 1.1 million sites that use their plugin. Check out those individual blog posts to learn how to activate IndexNow if you use those tools.
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How it works. The protocol is very simple — all you need to do is create a key on your server, and then post a URL to the search engine to notify IndexNow-participating search engines of the change. The steps include:
- Generate a key supported by the protocol using the online key generation tool.
- Host the key in text file named with the value of the key at the root of your web site.
- Start submitting URLs when your URLs are added, updated, or deleted. You can submit one URL or a set of URLs per API call.
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.
Now with these three new software players adding support, it makes adoption even easier for millions of sites.
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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’s personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.
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