After initially rejecting Microsoft’s open-source IndexNow search engine indexing protocol, Yoast reversed course and said they will now support it.
In a conversation with Search Engine Journal, founder Joost de Valk explains why.
Yoast’s adoption of IndexNow was a watershed moment for publishers and the search marketing community. It could herald wider adoption of the new protocol in the future, which could dramatically change SEO and content marketing in positive ways.
index now
IndexNow is an indexing protocol that helps websites receive near-instant indexing from search engines.
This is an open source initiative to help websites alert search engines to new or updated content.
Search engines benefit from no longer wasting data center resources by redundantly crawling unchanged and indexed web pages.
The IndexNow indexing protocol can even be used to notify search engines of newly removed pages and return a 404 server response code.
IndexNow reduces the amount of energy used by data centers, which in turn helps minimize the cause of global warming.
From search tools to web publishing platforms, a slew of companies already support IndexNow.
The SEO plugin RankMath also supports IndexNow, giving web publishers a way to instantly notify search engines of new or updated pages.
The two biggest barriers to adopting IndexNow are the Google and Yoast SEO plugins.
up to now.
Unofficial announcement from Yoast
When IndexNow was originally announced in October 2021, De Valk was the most prominent skeptic of the new indexing protocol, tweet He doesn’t see any value.
he still tweet:
“Since XML sitemaps were conceived, URL discovery has been a ‘solved problem’ as far as we are concerned.
For most websites, letting search engines crawl content is not a problem.
Yoast SEO generates XML sitemaps, and it can even ping search engines when these changes. “
So, after all this back and forth, it was a surprise when De Valk unofficially announced that Yoast was integrating IndexNow into the premium version of the Yoast SEO plugin.
This De Valk announcement blog post statement:
“So far, Bing, Yandex, and Seznam have all supported this new standard, and I’ve heard other search engines have joined them.
…We’ll be adding support for it in Yoast SEO Premium soon, and we look forward to seeing the impact (if any) it makes. “
The article doesn’t say why Yoast changed direction.
So Search Engine Magazine contacted De Valk to ask why they had changed their minds.
Devark responded:
“Yeah…so our perspective has changed for two reasons:
We’ve heard that some other search engines and systems are implementing it.
They changed how it works (or explained it better), we just need to ping one endpoint. With this we basically replaced the xml sitemap ping with a call to IndexNow and it’s done. “
When asked if he could see IndexNow eventually launching a free version of Yoast, De Valk replied:
“Yes, I can!
Don’t know when to wait. Let’s see how it works. “
Yoast integrates IndexNow
De Valk didn’t mention whether other search engines he’s heard about are adopting IndexNow, including Google.
Regardless, Yoast’s adoption of the new indexing protocol is a big deal, as it’s the world’s largest WordPress SEO plugin with over 5 million active installs.
This helps cement IndexNow’s position as a key indexing protocol and encourages more search engines to join the movement for instant indexing, which in turn will help SEO and publishers.
Featured Image: Vulp/Shutterstock
