IndexNow May Be a Game Changer for SEO

The search engine, Microsoft Bing, just recently announced the development of a new crawling protocol called IndexNow that “promises to make crawling and indexing more efficient,” according to a recent post on Search Engine Journal.

What could IndexNow mean for SEO and websites?

Traditionally, the search engines, such as Bing, Google, etc., have created and optimized ‘bots’ that are constantly crawling web pages across the internet to see what is new and/or updated. When these bots do locate new or updated content, it indexes it into their database in order to help search users find them.

Although search engines are constantly improving their search bots to work efficiently, there have always been some downsides to this system – bandwidth and delayed indexing.

The bandwidth issue is simply the increased traffic that these bots create along the digital pipeline on the web. Because the bots do not know where to go and at any point in time, they are just busy crawling everything, all of the time. It is not efficient use of that bandwidth. 

The other issue is one that the website finds frustrating — delays in getting your new/updated content indexed.

There are tools now that web managers and content providers can use to address this problem, like Google Search Console 

The new IndexNow Protocol will set up automation for platforms to easily notify search engines when a change has been made to a website. This would eliminate the constant searching by the search bots to find those changes… greatly reducing the bandwidth usage. Also, this would address website publishers’ concern about the speed of indexing.

So, what’s next for your SEO?

Even though Bing has announced their commitment to IndexNow, it has yet to be accepted by Google and WordPress, two of the largest players in the space. WordPress is looking at a plug-in option that allows websites to opt-in.

At this moment, you can go to IndexNow.com to submit your new pages to Bing and Yandex.
In the short-term, this does not change the way websites and service providers are providing affordable SEO, but that may change.

Read the full article at Search Engine Journal.