Everything We Know About IndexNow So Far - Search Engine Journal

Are you up to speed on IndexNow? Here's what we know so far about how it works, who supports it, and the benefits of real-time indexing.

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Hopefully, you’ve heard about IndexNow at this point.

We covered its announcement in October and in December, I had Fabrice Canel, Principal Program Manager for Microsoft Bing, on the SEJ Show to talk about this revolution in how search engines discover new and updated content.

But what is it, exactly, and what do you need to know about it for SEO?

Here’s what we know so far.

Why We Need IndexNow

Search engines have been discovering content the same way for a long time.

Way back in 1993, JumpStation became the first internet discovery tool to send out bots to follow (or crawl) links from website to website and create a content map, or index.

Within the next few years, other search engines adopted this process as a way to find new content.

This process was included in an algorithm that also considered content, relevancy, and other factors – and search engine optimization as we know it was born.

It didn’t take long before SEO-savvy web publishers recognized the importance of indexing in securing high search engine rankings. In fact, without indexed content, a website won’t generate organic traffic.

But therein lies the rub: Unless you’re a large, highly trafficked...

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