How to request that search bots index your content
Hello! Thanks for listening to SEO tips today.
After months of the “request indexing” tool being unavailable, the feature returned right before the end of 2020. Many SEO’s praised its return, but that was about it; SEOs went on about their day. We didn’t hear much about how the feature changed or any limitations it might now have.
You can submit about 10-12 a day before it throws you an error. Of course, both search engines also lean heavily on content discovery via clean XML sitemaps – especially when you submit them via your search accounts.
Now for Bing, you can submit 10,000 a day via their URL submission feature or you can submit URLs through the Bing Webmaster API. Botify has a feature where it will submit for you.
In general, though, you should think about why Google or Bing has not found your content and indexed it in the first place. With the increasing popularity of JavaScript frameworks, there could be something else going on that is limiting the search engines in discovering and indexing your content. And of course, your content also has to be *worth* indexing in the first place.
Now for Bing, years ago we noticed that if a URL was tweeted, it was picked up faster (and Bing says it does use social links as signals), though I’m not sure if that tactic still works today.
So that’s your tip for today – how to manually submit URLs via Google and Bing.
Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.
Listen to the previous episode: Google’s Question Hub
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