In October, Microsoft Bing announced the development of IndexNow, a new crawling protocol that promises to improve crawling and indexing efficiency. Google, on the other hand, has remained silent on whether it will be adopted or not until now.
A Google spokesperson confirmed that the company will be testing the new IndexNow protocol.
IndexNow
IndexNow is a new open-source protocol introduced by Microsoft, Bing, and Yandex that allows publishers to notify search engines when a web page is updated or a new page is added.
IndexNow eliminates the need for search engines to crawl websites to see if they’ve been updated, saving bandwidth and resources on both the search engine and publisher sides.
Support for the new protocol has been announced by major content management systems, Content Delivery Networks, and SEO firms.
Among the companies that have adopted the IndexNow protocol are:
- Wix
- Duda
- Cloudflare
- Akamai
- Botify
- oncrawl
- onely
- Yext
Google is Already Working to Improve Crawl Efficiency
IndexNow’s widespread acceptance has been contingent on what Google does, and Google has yet to comment on the new protocol.
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IndexNow appears to be a good fit for Google’s top priorities of sustainability and efficiency.
According to a spokesperson from Google:
“Google’s crawling mechanism is highly efficient and it’s still being improved.
For example, last year we announced that Googlebot supports HTTP/2, the next generation of the fundamental data transfer protocol of the web.
HTTP/2 is significantly more efficient than its predecessors and it saves resources for both Google and web sites. We use HTTP/2 in over half of all crawls.”
Google has announced that IndexNow will be tested
For the time being, Google appears to be taking a cautious approach to the new protocol, which makes sense. Because web crawling is the foundation of a search engine, any changes in the protocol should be accompanied by clear benefits.
According to 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.”
WordPress is being awaited
WordPress is the second most influential entity after Google. WordPress is still talking about it, and it appears that they are encouraging the development of a plugin rather than rushing to integrate it into the WordPress core. WordPress is also looking for broader industry support, which includes not only Google but also other search engines.
A lead developer at WordPress commented:
I’m still not 100% convinced that having WordPress ping each of the engines individually is ideal, however, it’s not the worst.
I’m still not 100% convinced that having an API key / verification callback should be allowed.
All supported providers would need to be defaulted in core, so as not to preference any given engine
I think this should be developed as a plugin first, and then proposed to WordPress core as a feature plugin, to allow development of it to occur separately and then a suggestion to add it to core once feature complete.
That would also allow site owners to opt-in to using this prior to WordPress fully implementing it (Which would be in WordPress 6.0 at the absolute earliest, Q2ish 2022 at a guess).
IndexNow will be tested by Google
Adoption of IndexNow by Google would be significant for the entire industry, perhaps enough to convince WordPress to incorporate it into their core, and if not, to make it available as a plugin. It makes sense for Google to put it to the test. There is no word on how long this testing will continue.
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