In order to index more content from a WordPress website to different search engines, Microsoft has released the IndexNow plugin.
One can easily spot the plugin in the WordPress Plugin directory.
The main task of the plugin is to index URLs from WordPress website to different search engines.
And what is so interesting about this plugin is, it indexes the URL even if the site is not verified on the respective search engine.
Once installed, the plugin will generate an API Key that hosts on the site.
That API Key detects whether a page is updated, created, or deleted.
Once reading the page status, the API ping the search engine accordingly.
How to use it?
To use the plugin, first install it from here.
Next, toggle on the automatic submission feature and that’s it.
The plugin will automatically capture the URL to ping to different search engine bots for indexing.
Even though the plugin sports the automatic URL submission feature, one can manually submit a URL as well.
Features
In addition to submitting the URLs for indexing, you can also check the list of recent URLs submitted for indexing.
The plugin also helps users to identify the list of URLs that failed from being submitted.
It also lists out the recent successful and failed submissions.
It is an open-source plugin and one can enjoy its full source code from here.
The plugin is made using six programming languages listed below:
- JavaScript
- PHP
- TypeScript
- SCSS
- HTML
- Hack
Contributers
At the time of writing this article, there are only two contributors who made the plugin – Pingal Dixit and Mavarsh.
What is IndexNow?
IndexNow is a simple ping protocol that lets the search engines know about the status of a page once updated, deleted, or modified.
Microsoft Bing and Yandex had already adopted the IndexNow protocol whereas Google is currently testing it out. That means if you use the IndexNow plugin then as soon as you update any content on your website, it reflects on Bing and Yandex.
If you own a WordPress website and also using Cloudflare then can skip installing this plugin as Cloudflare already has an option to enable the IndexNow protocol for your website.
The option is called Crawler Hints which is in beta right now but soon going to be stable.
