Microsoft announced that IndexNow is now also supported by another WordPress plugin named SEOPress. This gives another 200,000 sites that are using this plugin easy access to enable IndexNow on their WordPress sites.
“By integrating the possibilities offered by the API, SEOPress allows more than 200,000 sites to be indexed more quickly and efficiently, all without any technical knowledge necessary and automatically,” Microsoft said.
IndexNow growth. Just last week, IndexNow has grown to support millions of sites by adding integration with Duda, All in One WordPress SEO plugin and Rank Math SEO plugin. 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. With these providers integrating IndexNow, we are now up to millions of sites adopting IndexNow, just several months after IndexNow was initially rolled out.
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.
How to activate IndexNow in SEOPress. First, you need version 5.4 of SEOPress, then to enable IndexNow, check off the “automatically notify search engines” option is checked from the settings tab of the plugin.
How it works. If you using a provide or Plugin that has this built in, just follow the steps they provide. If you need to code this manually into your CMS, then 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.
Microsoft continues to work with providers to adopt IndexNow and grow its reach to 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.
