Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. The SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hi, welcome to the latest episode of SEO is not that hard. It's me, ed Dawson, here hosting, as usual, and today I'm well, I'm asking the question are indexing tools about to get hit? And this has come up because, well, what was the date this happened?

On the 11th of September, google announced some changes to their indexing API. Okay, now, the indexing API, if it's not something you're aware of, it's a method where you can programmatically tell Google about new pages that you want indexing, and this is an API that's been around for a long time, but it always said on the documentation of this api that it was only for um listen pages with job postings or pages with broadcast events on, like tv broadcast or podcast broadcast or any kind of like event where you are going to be broadcasting something, so you want it to be brought to Google's attention. Google wants to know about it quickly. Same with jobs they want to know when new job posts come up. So this is content that Google specifically wants to know about early and be able to sort of index quickly.

Now lots of tools grew up around this API that essentially abused the API for what it was essentially meant to be used for. They were using it to submit all sorts of pages for indexing, and not just the ones that met the criteria of being a job posting or a broadcast event. Now this people were finding they could use these tools and it would get pages indexed that weren't being indexed naturally. So the normal way that a page gets indexed is google will crawl the web, crawl your site, and it will discover new pages as you create them, and it might take there might be a bit of time delay between page being created in google discovering that it exists and then, once it's as good as this, these pages exist, it still might not decide to index them, for whatever reason. There's many reasons why google might not decide to index a page straight away, and people were using um indexing, the indexing api to circumvent this delay and try and sort of kick google into indexing pages.

And, by all accounts, I mean I think it worked in a lot of cases. I mean, well, the indexing tools themselves said they worked and I saw some people say they worked in some cases, some people who had less luck with them, but clearly they've been working for enough people that these tools you know they were getting payment and having customers, like I say, google have now changed the API docs with a new red warning on them and I'm just going to get the document up so I can read it out to you. So, yeah, there now. The new red warning says all submissions through the indexing API undergo rigorous spam detection. Any attempts to abuse the indexing API, including the use of multiple accounts or the means to exceed usage quotas, may result in access being revoked. Learn more about our spam policies and then a link after their spam policies. So it looks like they're really cracking down on the fact that this api is really meant to be for these short-lived pages like job posting and live stream videos, and not just about, you know, using it as a way to try and get content indexed. That isn't short-lived and is sort of a normal part of your site and Google wants to discover these in the normal ways. So it's going to be very interesting to see how many of these indexing tools that it affects, because there are other ways to get pages indexed, such, as, you know, linking to them. Obviously, the higher and closer to the home page link that a page on your site is, the more likely is that it's going to be indexed, because it's going to get more page rank from the homepage, which will help it rank. Essentially, now you don't need to use an indexing service to get pages indexed.

Generally, there are some sort of best practices you can follow to, you know, make it more likely that google's going to index stuff for you. So in the first instance, if you're launching a new site you've got launching a new domain then strongly recommend that you verify ownership of it in google search console and then you can then say, as soon as you've registered in search console, submit the home page. And because you can submit within the google search console, you can request pages to be indexed, and I think the limit's around about 20 pages a day. But if you're just starting a new site, then 20 pages should be fine to get you going and it is a per-day basis, so over a week you can just manually request pages to be indexed and it generally works very quickly.

So, for example, just create I created a new domain, um, put like a wordpress page site. I'll put it with just a home page and registered in google search console that the index page be uh, home page, be indexed, and then within two hours I could do a site in url lookup query in Google and the page was showing. So the page was ranking in Google for its domain name and today, the very next day, it's now ranking on page five for the h1 term that I put on that page, which is a long tail sort of local niche term. But it is ranking, you know, within 24 hours. You know it's gone from just you know within a couple hours of it the ranking for its domain name and within 24 hours it was ranking for the h1. So this is a brand new domain with no backlinks or anything like that, and got it indexed just using google search console. Use sitemapxml and submit that sitemapxml in google search console as well. Now obviously you can link to it from your robotstxt and that should happen by default you should want that to happen. But you can boost the speed at which you know google bot will come along and sort of query that sitemapxml by submitting it as well in google Search Console. So those are two key things you can use doing Search Console to get things indexed more quickly or at least to get them crawled in the first instance.

If you're doing it with a sitemap, are all those pages going to get indexed? Depends how many pages you're asking and depends the strength of your domain. Brand new domain with no page rank, with no links to it, is not going to be able to index as many pages as a site that's been in existence for a long time and it's got lots of pages linked to it and therefore lots of page rank that is built up that it can then flow through the site to help boost pages into the index. But those are the things you need to think about and obviously, on the design of your site itself, always try and make sure that every page has got a link to it from another page on your site that is ideally preferably an already indexed page. If you don't link to your pages that you're currently on your site, then Google's going to have a hard time finding them. Even if they do end up in the site by XML, google will look at it and will download, will crawl pages, but finding it's less likely to put it in the index if it hasn't got any links internal links to it from your site, because there's no page rank flowing to it, and you know page rank is a key component of deciding at what point pages are going to go into the index. So, yeah, so there's just a few tips to help you get stuff indexed without having to need using one of these tools or waiting for google to discover you just in the way of the natural crawl. So, yeah, just a short one today. So I hope you found that useful. It's going to be a good thing to keep an eye on how these indexing tools carry on, if they can carry on, if they do carry on or if any other new techniques come out for helping accelerate indexing for people having issues with it.

Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at Keywords People Use that you can book a free, no obligation, one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeoplesusecom slash demo keywordspeopleusecom slash demo, where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.

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