The popular WordPress SEO plugin, Yoast SEO, now offers IndexNow. For those who don’t have an idea what IndexNow is, it is a Microsoft and Yandex initiative protocol that allows site owners to submit content to search engines. This new feature will be available in the premium version of Yoast SEO as part of its latest version, 19.2.
What is IndexNow?
IndexNow is an open-source protocol that website owners or publishers can use to index across search engines every time they make content changes on their landing pages.
To simply explain it, it is a ping that notifies search engines that your website URL and content have been added, updated, or deleted.
By using IndexNow, it can eliminate the need for the usual exploratory crawls. Thus, it can improve the overall internet efficiency.
How IndexNow Does Work?
IndexNow offers a very simple protocol. To use IndexNow, website publishers must create a key on your server and post their URL to the search engine to notify participating search engines of the changes you made on your website.
Here’s the step-by-step process below:
- Step 1 – Generate a key that is supported by the protocol using its online key generation tool.
- Step 2 – Host the key in a text file, then add the value of the key to the root of your website.
- Step 3 – Submit URLs when your URLs are added, updated, or deleted. You can also submit one URL or a set of URLs per its API call.
WordPress Integration
Microsoft has its own IndexNow plugin in WordPress for sites to download and use. Yoast also decided to build it as part of their premium plugin. According to sources, this move from Yoast is brought by the latest change to the protocol with its second significant development.
IndexNow has changed the endpoint of the API. It now enables sites to only have to ping a single site, making its process more simple and efficient. Yoast stated that this update makes IndexNow a fit to their view of sustainable crawling and index solutions.
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