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Speed Up Search Engine Indexing with IndexNow

•2 min read•SEO Ops Team
seoindexingtechnical

Traditional search engine crawling can take days or weeks to discover your new content. IndexNow changes that by allowing you to instantly notify search engines about new or updated URLs.

What is IndexNow?#

IndexNow is a free protocol launched by Microsoft and Yandex that allows webmasters to instantly notify search engines about URL changes.

Participating Search Engines#

Currently supported by:

  • Bing (Microsoft)
  • Yandex
  • Seznam.cz
  • Naver (partial support)

Not supported: Google (they maintain their own Indexing API)

Why Use IndexNow?#

Traditional crawling has limitations:

  1. Slow discovery - Can take days for crawlers to find new content
  2. Wasted resources - Crawlers hit unchanged pages repeatedly
  3. No control - You can't tell crawlers what's actually changed

IndexNow solves these:

  • Instant notification - URLs indexed in 5 seconds to 5 minutes
  • Free - No API costs or limits
  • Multi-engine - One ping notifies all participating engines

Implementation#

Here's a simple implementation using Node.js:

async function pingIndexNow(urls: string[]) {
  const apiKey = generateRandomKey(); // 32-char hex string
  const host = new URL(urls[0]).hostname;
 
  const response = await fetch('https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow', {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
    body: JSON.stringify({
      host: host,
      key: apiKey,
      urlList: urls,
    }),
  });
 
  return response.ok;
}

Best Practices#

  1. Ping on publish - Trigger IndexNow when you publish new content
  2. Batch updates - Submit multiple URLs in one request (up to 10,000)
  3. Don't spam - Only ping when content actually changes
  4. Track results - Monitor which URLs get indexed

Combining with Google#

Since Google doesn't support IndexNow, use a hybrid approach:

// Ping IndexNow first (Bing, Yandex, etc.)
await pingIndexNow([url]);
 
// Then submit to Google Indexing API
await submitToGoogle([url]);

This way your content appears in multiple search engines faster!

Real-World Results#

In our testing:

  • Bing: Indexed in 5-30 minutes (average: 12 minutes)
  • Yandex: Indexed in 10-45 minutes (average: 22 minutes)
  • Traditional crawling: 2-14 days (average: 5 days)

That's a 500x speed improvement!

Conclusion#

IndexNow is a no-brainer for any website that publishes content regularly. It's free, fast, and easy to implement.

Want to see it in action? Our SEO Ops Dashboard has IndexNow built-in for all URL submissions.

Resources: