IndexNow is an open-source protocol that allows website owners to instantly notify participating search engines about changes on their websites, such as new, updated, or deleted URLs. Instead of waiting for search engine crawlers to discover changes through traditional crawling, IndexNow enables websites to proactively "push" notifications to search engines via a simple API call or ping, which prompts faster crawling and indexing of the updated content.
How IndexNow works:
- When a website publishes new content, updates existing pages, or removes pages, it sends an instant notification (a "ping") to the IndexNow API.
- This notification includes the URLs that have changed.
- Participating search engines (such as Bing, Yandex, Seznam, and others) receive this notification simultaneously.
- The search engines then prioritize crawling and indexing these URLs, significantly reducing the time it takes for changes to appear in search results.
- This push-based approach contrasts with the traditional "pull" model, where search engines periodically crawl websites to discover changes on their own.
Key benefits of IndexNow:
- Faster indexing of new or updated content, often reducing indexing time by around 50% or more.
- Reduced server load because search engines no longer need to crawl the entire site frequently to find changes.
- Improved efficiency for search engines and website owners by focusing crawling efforts only on URLs that have changed.
- When a URL is submitted to one IndexNow-enabled search engine, it is automatically shared with all other participating search engines, maximizing coverage with minimal effort.
Current support:
- IndexNow is supported by major search engines including Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Seznam.cz, and others.
- Google has not fully adopted IndexNow yet but has tested it and may consider integration in the future.
In summary, IndexNow is a protocol designed to streamline and accelerate the indexing process by enabling websites to notify search engines instantly about content changes, improving SEO efficiency and reducing delays in search result updates.
