Do you know what is IndexNow and why should you add IndexNow in WordPress?
IndexNow is a brand new SEO initiative produced by Microsoft to help your site get indexed faster in search engines. IndexNow works increase discoverability of new web content and thus improve your SEO results.
In this article, we’re going to learn how to add IndexNow in WordPress to boost SEO results.
What is IndexNow?
IndexNow is an automatic signal sender that lets search engines (such as Bing, Yandex, etc.) know when a post or page on your site has been added, updated, or even deleted. It helps search engines to quickly update their search results in SERP, which works speed up overall SEO results.
It has been started by Microsoft and currently supported by search engines like Microsoft Bing and Yandex.
At present times, almost all search engines use XML sitemaps to find out new content and updates. One of the biggest challenge with XML sitemaps is that they take several days or sometimes weeks to discover new content updates because they visit your site at random period or intervals. In such a situation, search engine bots look really inefficient.
When crawlers visit your sitemap, it visits every single link that it finds on the website sitemap as well as every single link present inside of each page. The whole process is really very long and IndexNow aims to solve it.
Instead of having search engine bots or crawlers randomly check every single post or page on your website to find out new or updated content, IndexNow allows search engines to simply let them know when you published a new post or updated an existing piece of content on your website.
In this way, search engines can quickly update their search results. IndexNow is a win — win situation for both — website owners and search engines.
Now, let’s know how to add IndexNow in WordPress to boost your SEO rankings.
Method 1. How to Add IndexNow in WordPress using AIOSEO WordPress Plugin:
AIOSEO (All in One SEO) is one of the best WordPress SEO plugin with over 3 million active installations. It can help improve SEO rankings of any WordPress website.
Currently, AIOSEO is the first WordPress SEO plugin which allows IndexNow support for WordPress.
For this, you first need to go to Plugins » Add New Plugin. Now, search for All in One SEO in the search box available in the right of your WordPress dashboard.
Install and activate this plugin.
In this tutorial, we will go with the premium version of All in One SEO plugin because it includes IndexNow and other powerful SEO features.
Once you activated this plugin, you just need to go AIOSEO » Feature Manager from your WordPress dashboard panel to enable the IndexNow feature.
Once you enabled IndexNow feature, it is automatically configured and ready to go. You don’t need to do anything else.
AIOSEO (All in One SEO) is beginner friendly, it automatically generates an IndexNow API key for your site and configure it for you.
You can also verify it later by going to AIOSEO » General Settings and then click on the Webmaster Tools tab. Here, you will see an option of IndexNow, click on it.
Once you click, you will see that the IndexNow API key of your website is already pre-configured.
Method 2. How to Add IndexNow in WordPress using the IndexNow plugin
If you don’t want to switch to All in One SEO, then you can use this option instead.
For this, you just need to install and activate a free WordPress plugin — IndexNow utility.
After activation, you need to go to Settings » IndexNow in your WordPress dashboard panel. Here, you just need to click on the Let’s Get Started button. It will now automatically generate your API key and get everything configured for you.
After that, you will see an interface something like shown in the screenshot below. It shows IndexNow stats such as successful submissions, failed submissions and more.
That’s all, you have successfully added IndexNow to your WordPress website.
Take Away
IndexNow is an awesome feature that helps both small and large websites. It works speed up SEO rankings with instant content indexing.
Here; we want to make it clear that IndexNow doesn’t replace sitemaps. You still should have XML sitemaps, news sitemap, video sitemap and other advanced sitemaps to work boost your SEO rankings. You should use IndexNow alongside other sitemaps to gain a competitive advantage.
We hope this article helped you know how to add IndexNow in WordPress. If you liked this article, then do not forget to share it with others.
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