Microsoft Bing announced in October the development of a new crawling protocol called IndexNow that promises to make crawling and indexing more efficient. Google however has remained silent about whether they will adopt it or not until now.
A Google spokesperson issued a statement affirming that Google will be testing the new IndexNow protocol.
IndexNow
Microsoft Bing and Yandex introduced a new open-source protocol called IndexNow that allows publishers to notify search engines when a web page is updated or a new page is added.
IndexNow alleviates the need for search engines to crawl websites to check if they’ve been updated, saving bandwidth and resources at the search engine side and on the publisher side.
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Major content management systems, Content Delivery Networks and SEO companies have announced support for the new protocol.
The list of companies adopting IndexNow protocol includes:
- Wix
- Duda
- Cloudflare
- Akamai
- Botify
- oncrawl
- onely
- Yext
Google is Already Proactive on Crawl Efficiency
The widespread acceptance of IndexNow has somewhat hinged on what Google would do and until today, Google has not commented on the new protocol.