In October, Microsoft Bing announced the development of a new crawling protocol known as IndexNow that promises to increase the efficiency of crawling and indexing.
A recent statement issued by a Google spokesperson confirms that Google will indeed be testing the IndexNow protocol. Albeit taking a very measured approach to the new protocol, it’s good to see Google considering changes in protocol.
As said by Google:
“We take a holistic approach to sustainability at Google, including efforts to develop the most efficient and accurate index of the web.
We have been carbon neutral since 2007 and we are on pace to be carbon-free by 2030 across both our data centers and campuses.
We’re encouraged by work to make web crawling more efficient, and we will be testing the potential benefits of this protocol.”
What Is IndexNow?
A new open-source protocol called IndexNow was introduced by Microsoft Bing and Yandex; the protocol allows publishers to notify search engines as soon as a new page is added or a website is updated.
The IndexNow protocol saves bandwidth and resources on both the search engine and publisher side by alleviating the need for search engines to crawl sites to check if they’ve been updated.
In lieu of the above, a few major content management systems and CDN’s have announced support for the new protocol, except one…
Will WordPress Support IndexNow Technology?
The open-source content management system, WordPress, is still considering adding support for IndexNow. They seem to be encouraging the development of a plugin as opposed to integrating it into the WordPress core itself. Additionally, WordPress is also looking for wider industry buy-in, presumably from other search engines.
If Google adopts IndexNow, it will be a big move forward for the SEO industry. As it stands, it makes sense for Google to test it so hopefully IndexNow is closer than we realise.