Microsoft unveils new IndexNow plugin for WordPress websites

Search engine portals Microsoft Bing and Yandex have released a new plugin that enables the integration of the IndexNow protocol on a WordPress website.

The open-source software offering is available now in the WordPress plugin directory, allowing automated submission of URLs from WordPress websites to multiple search engines without the need to register and verify them.

Developed by the Bing Webmaster team, the plugin automatically generates and hosts the API key on a WordPress site.

IndexNow activated

Using an API, once search engines are notified of updates, they can quickly crawl and reflect website changes in their index and search results - automatically submitting the URLs in the background.

With the aim of ensuring search engines always have the latest version of updated sites, website owners providing a clear signal helps search engines to prioritize crawl for these URLs, thereby limiting the need for exploratory crawl to test if the content has changed.

“Ensuring timely information is available for searchers is critical,” wrote Microsoft Bing in a blog post.

“Yet historically one of the biggest pain points for website owners has been to have search engines quickly discover and consider their latest website changes. It can take days or even weeks for new URLs to be discovered and indexed in search engines, resulting in loss of potential traffic, customers, and even sales.”

The IndexNow plugin is also an initiative for a more open Internet - by notifying one search engine, website owners will also notify all search engines that have adopted IndexNow.

Many large websites (such as eBay, LinkedIn, MSN, and GitHub) have already adopted Bing Webmaster URL submission API and plan to migrate to IndexNow, according to Microsoft.