How to Add IndexNow in WordPress (For Faster Indexing)

Want to know how to add IndexNow to your WordPress site?

Ask any SEO professional what the most important element of SEO is, and most will probably say it’s getting content indexed.

Thankfully, search engines are advancing in technology, helping to ensure faster indexing of content. This, of course, also means quicker SEO wins for publishers.

That’s all thanks to the IndexNow protocol.

What is IndexNow?

Search engines have two primary functions:

• Crawling: Discovering content on your website.
• Indexing: Storing crawled URLs into a database for faster retrieval.
• Ranking: Serving content to users by rating the best-fit content for a query.

It can take search engines anything from a couple of hours to months to crawl and index content on your website. Of course, this means your SEO efforts only start getting results after indexing.

This is where IndexNow comes into play.

IndexNow is a protocol developed by Bing (in conjunction with Yandex) that automatically pings search engines when you update pages on your website. Every other search engine utilizing the IndexNow protocol is alerted to the changes when this happens. As a result, your content is indexed faster.

Traditionally, search engines discover new content and updates via XML sitemaps. However, you have to wait for search engines to visit your site for that to happen. The problem is that you can never know when they’ll do that as they visit websites randomly.

When search engine spiders visit your sitemap, they follow every single link featured on the sitemap. They also attempt to visit every link on each page of your website. The two biggest problems with this are:

• You have no control over when search engines crawl and index your site.
• As can be expected, this is a resource-intensive process for search engines. Thus the length of time it takes to index a post.

IndexNow was designed to solve these problems as it gives you control over when search engines crawl new and updated content. It also reduces the resources needed as search engines only crawl URLs with new or updated content. They don't have to discover new content by exploring all the links on your site.

That’s why every serious website owner or manager must take advantage of the IndexNow protocol. 

How to Add IndexNow to Your WordPress Site Using AIOSEO

All In One SEO (AIOSEO) is one of the best WordPress SEO plugins on the market.

Having been in the industry since 2007, AIOSEO is one plugin you can depend on to help you optimize your site for SEO. With over 3 million active installs, it’s definitely an SEO toolkit you can rely on. Notable features include:

• Cornerstone Content: Easily build topic clusters and enhance your topical authority and semantic SEO strategy.
• Search Statistics: This powerful Google Search Console integration lets you track your keyword rankings and see important SEO metrics with 1-click, and more.
• SEO Revisions: Track any changes you make to your site and see their impact on your SEO. Plus, you get to see on a timeline how Google updates affect your site.
• Advanced Robots.txt Editor: Easily generate and customize your robots.txt file for better crawling and indexing. 
• TruSEO Highlighter: Makes it easy to spot on-page SEO issues and gives recommendations for fixing them.
• Next-gen Schema generator: This no-code schema generator enables users to generate and output any schema markup on your site.
• Redirection Manager: Helps you manage redirects and eliminate 404 errors, making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site.
• Link Assistant: Powerful internal linking tool that automates building links between pages on your site. It also gives you an audit of outbound links.
• SEO Preview: This gives you an overview of your search and social snippets and general SEO so you can improve your optimization.
• Sitemap generator: Automatically generate different types of sitemaps to notify all search engines of any updates on your site.
• And more.

AIOSEO also has the powerful IndexNow feature for fast indexing on search engines that support the IndexNow protocol (like Bing and Yandex). That’s why, when it comes to implementing IndexNow on your WordPress website, AIOSEO should be your go-to plugin.

Activating IndexNow In AIOSEO

Once you’ve got those preliminary requirements sorted, we can get started with the business of the day — adding IndexNow to your WordPress site. To do that, head over to your AIOSEO dashboard and click on the Features Manager option. This will open up a page with several AIOSEO features you can toggle on or off.

Near the bottom, you’ll find the IndexNow feature. Toggle the switch to Activated.

After activating IndexNow, you can click on the Manage link, which will take you to AIOSEO’s Webmaster Tools panel.

You’ll find IndexNow listed among the list of webmaster tools. The green tick on the IndexNow icon shows you’ve successfully activated IndexNow. The plugin automatically generates and hosts an API key for you, so you don’t have to go through the complicated process involved in doing so.

That’s it!

You’ve added IndexNow to your WordPress site. Now, every time you update content on your website, search engines are automatically pinged. Your new/updated content will get indexed faster.

Activating IndexNow using the IndexNow Plugin

To make the protocol's adoption easier, Microsoft created a plugin to help users implement IndexNow.

You can find the plugin in WordPress’s repository. After downloading and activating the IndexNow Plugin, you can get started by going to your WordPress dashboard and clicking on Settings » IndexNow. Next, click on the Get Started button, and an API key will automatically be generated. All your IndexNow settings will also be automatically configured.

Once everything has been successfully implemented, you will see a screen with all your IndexNow stats.

Just like that, you’ve added IndexNow on your site. The protocol will detect any changes to your content and automatically submit the URLs to search engines — without any effort on your part.

Once you've published your post or page, you can use AIOSEO to check the index status of your posts and pages.

This will help you easily keep tabs on the index status of your pages, making it easier to troubleshoot the unindexed ones.

IndexNow: Taking SEO into the Future

IndexNow is a protocol that’s already revolutionizing SEO. Early adopters will have an advantage in gaining mileage faster on search engine results pages (SERPs). 

Does this mean sitemaps are now a thing of the past?

Not at all.

IndexNow is not a replacement for sitemaps. You should still generate sitemaps to help search engines crawl your website more efficiently, especially those that are yet to embrace the IndexNow protocol.

We hope this post has helped you know how to add IndexNow in WordPress. You may also want to check out other articles on our blog, like our guide to common SEO mistakes to avoid or our tutorial on using HTML tags for SEO.

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Kato Nkhoma Content Writer

Kato is one of those rare unicorns born with a pen in his hand—so the legend says. He’s authored 2 books and produced content for hundreds of brands. When he’s not creating content for AIOSEO, you’ll find him either watching tech videos on YouTube or playing with his kids. And if you can’t find him, he’s probably gone camping.

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