IndexNow is the initiative from Yandex and Bing which aims to close the gap between publishing content on your site and it appearing in a search engine or aggregator.
Potentially, it can drastically cut down on the amount of total energy spent by many different companies from crawling the web looking for content. Instead, it notifies them all whenever content is ready to be crawled or removed.
Image source: https://www.bing.com/indexnow
And they have announced that from November, submitting your website to one search engine via IndexNow means it’s instantly submitted to all other IndexNow enabled search engines.
This also means that webmasters are no longer reliant on waiting for a search engine to crawl a page for the information. They can submit the page to IndexNow knowing it gets fed directly to all participating search engines.
As of now, Google is not yet participating. However, this is a worthwhile project even without them on board and even with the reduced market share this means. If every site that needs to access your data has to crawl it, that’s not only costly to you and them, but it’s also energy inefficient. Especially considering the time spent crawling content that hasn’t changed or isn’t even included in the SERPs.
This project has a great deal of potential, particularly if Bing would open up the other side of it as well, with wider access to the submitted pages. There are thousands of different tools which could benefit, especially if you could search these by verticals.
Opening up the web and making content via new paradigms, not just via a search engine, could be a fantastic direction for Bing to take. After all, the traditional search engine approach is now so entrenched within Google that approaching it from a radically different angle could be a way back into the market for them.
How to get started
If you want to submit your site to Bing and Yandex the process is pretty straightforward. especially if you use a CMS that supports it. Although WordPress doesn’t officially support it yet, there are already plugins available.
If you don’t use a CMS or have a custom-built solution it gets a little more complicated as you need a feed of content to submit the URLs. Check out the IndexNow FAQ for a step-by-step guide to getting set up.
