Microsoft Bing and Yandex announce new IndexNow protocol for search engines

Microsoft Bing and Yandex (the most popular search engine in Russia) today announced IndexNow, a new way for websites owners to inform search engines about latest content changes on their website. Instead of waiting for search engines to discover that the content has changed, website owners can now do a simple ping so that search engines know that a URL and its content has been added, updated, or deleted.

With IndexNow, search engines know immediately the “URLs that have changed, helping them prioritize crawl for these URLs and thereby limiting organic crawling to discover new content.”

Also, by notifying one search engine you will notify all search engines that have adopted IndexNow. In the future, if IndexNow is widely adopted, search engines may limit crawling of websites. Microsoft Bing and Yandex are offering IndexNow under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License.