Problem

Your company has just launched a new product line; or you’ve just been informed by management that there is a very important announcement coming. In either situation, updating your website with this information is critical to getting the word out to consumers and potential clients. So, you create your compelling content, publish it to your website and then…you wait for Bing, Google, Yanex, and all the other big search engines to crawl your website on the schedule they have deemed appropriate for their business, not yours.  But this doesn’t have to be the end of the story: Enter IndexNow.

Solution

IndexNow is an API protocol to update search engines, notifying them that your website’s content has changed. It is a simple API call, which notifies a search provider that a url or set of urls should be reindexed. IndexNow allows website owners to request faster indexing of their content.

So using the example above, as a content editor you make changes to your website using your Content Management System (CMS). Now, instead of being at the mercy of Bing/Google, etc. to crawl your new content, which may take days or even weeks you can post a notification to Bing’s IndexNow endpoint, informing them to index the new content as soon as possible. Additionally, it isn’t necessary to notify more than one search provider; any search provider which uses IndexNow also agrees to send this notification to all other search providers implementing IndexNow.

Currently, IndexNow has implementation support from Bing and Yandex.

Demo

There are many CMS solutions that your website may use; here is a brief video demonstration showing how content updates in the Umbraco CMS can use the IndexNow API to update search. When content items in the Umbraco Backoffice are published, unpublished or deleted, a notification immediately is sent to a simulated IndexNow API, thus triggering the event for search engines to crawl your site. This gets your new, important content in front of the web a whole lot faster.

Let us know if you have any questions or need assistance implementing IndexNow with your CMS platform!