Hello!
The IndexNow plugin is compatible with TSF. However, its first-party implementation falls short of promoting the best programming practices for WordPress, and that’s made evident by the mixed reviews.
We tried to hold off to show Microsoft that sitemaps were still a valid protocol, but they didn’t budge.
So, IndexNow will be included with TSF (either directly in the plugin or as an extension). From TSF v5.0.5 (ETA tomorrow), we’ll remove the now deprecated/obsolete pinging functionality for both Bing and Google. Sitemaps will continue to work, but search engines will decide when to crawl it periodically autonomously.
Some clarifications are needed here.
Sitemaps (I own the protocol for Microsoft and Bing for the past 16 years) has many limitations: no real time notification, weak delete signals. Sitemaps are generally visited by search engines once a day or so.
IndexNow is an open protocol for all participant IndexNow enabled search engines allowing secure real time notification process for all added, updated, deleted URLs. Open as Search Engines adopting IndexNow agree to share all submitted key-validated URLs with all other IndexNow Search Engines. We already received more the 2.5 billion URLs per day from millions of web sites. Our IndexNow plugin was built per WordPress feedback to learn, moving notification to core or pingomatic is still pending core.trac.ww.wp.xz.cn/ticket/52900
Modern search users need real time indexing, sitemaps does not allow this, IndexNow does. Sitemaps is still useful as catchup mechanism if IndexNow ping are lost.
These days, search users require real-time indexing, which sitemaps do not support. IndexNow allow this. Sitemaps still serve a purpose as a catch-up mechanism in case IndexNow pings are lost and to help focusing search engines index selection to this snapshop of all relevant URLs listed in the sitemaps.
Thanks for your contributions and for sharing your thoughts, Fabrice.
Still, what you’re saying is the theory. But all things considered, sitemaps worked perfectly fine for indexing until its pinging functionality got subsided to force IndexNow’s adoption.
Deindexing is less pressing, and the delay was acceptable in almost all cases but legal ones; however, DMCA and webmaster removal tools served well for those.
Moreover, real-time indexing still doesn’t mean real-time ranking, so search engine users don’t necessarily benefit from this. Also, considering that Bing News PubHub, which could actually benefit significantly from IndexNow, still uses RSS, I’m not sure where the priorities are: Help the search engine users or increase branding with SEO tools?
I don’t mean to say that the IndexNow protocol isn’t a welcome addition, but it’s not a complete substitution for sitemaps. It was clear that Bing wanted to make sitemaps obsolete, so I opposed implementing it and ignored the email you or your colleague sent me to add it to The SEO Framework — I use an automated deletion policy (privacy by design), so I cannot find it anymore.
If you can provide evidence that Bing’s energy consumption went down since the pinging endpoint got blocked and IndexNow adoption increased, you should post that in the Trac ticket. It’d also sway me to promote the protocol.
