Wix adds IndexNow support for faster indexing

Wix, a very popular website publishing platform, has adopted IndexNow, the Microsoft-backed indexing initiative. Wix is used by about 2.5% of all websites on the internet, based on some recent data, so this is a big deal for the platform.

“This means that Wix customers can now quickly reflect their latest content changes (added, updated, and deleted) in search engines search results and allowing them to drive more customers to their sites,” Microsoft wrote.

“We’re excited to release the integration with IndexNow as part of our collaboration with Microsoft Bing,” said Einat Hoobian-Seybold, Product Lead at Wix. “This integration marks yet another step in our dedication to providing users with exceptional out-of-the-box SEO solutions, simplifying the process of promoting their websites quickly and effortlessly.”

What is IndexNow. IndexNow provides a method for websites owners to instantly inform search engines about latest content changes on their website. IndexNow is a simple ping protocol so that search engines know that a URL and its content has been added, updated, or deleted, allowing search engines to quickly reflect this change in their search results. The co-sharing of IndexNow went fully live last month in January 2022.

60 million sites. “Today, more than 60 million websites are publishing over 1.4 billion URLs per day to the IndexNow API,” Microsoft said. “This month, IndexNow 12% of all new URLs clicked in web search results are first discovered in IndexNow,” the company added.

How it works. The protocol is very simple — all you need to do is create a key on your server, and then post a URL to the search engine to notify IndexNow-participating search engines of the change. The steps include:

1. Generate a key supported by the protocol using the online key generation tool.
2. Host the key in text file named with the value of the key at the root of your web site.
3. Start submitting URLs when your URLs are added, updated, or deleted. You can submit one URL or a set of URLs per API call.

Why we care. Like we said before, instant indexing is an SEO’s dream when it comes to giving search engines the most updated content on a site. The protocol is very simple and it requires very little developer effort to add this to your site, so it makes sense to implement this if you care about speedy indexing.

Now with Wix adopting it, even more pages can be discovered by Bing Search and the other search engines like Bing, Naver, Yandex, and Seznam.cz.