Bing and Yandex now share URLs submitted through IndexNow

IndexNow, a company that provides connectivity solutions to several search engines has officially announced the ability to share URLs between Microsoft Bing and Yandex.

One of the greatest challenges for webmasters today is getting their websites indexed fast enough.

The co-sharing feature between the two search engines allows you to better distribute the load of your indexing process between two high-quality search engines that both have excellent customer reach.

What does IndexNow do?

IndexNow is a tool that can help your site make better use of search engines. It allows your site to quickly let the major search engines know about any changes you make to it, so you can benefit from improved indexing.

The IndexNow protocol was launched a little over a year ago, aimed at making it easier for search engines to share information about the web pages they crawl. 

IndexNow allows website publishers to notify search engines via a simple HTTP or HTTPS request. 

This notification causes a browser (or another client) to send an HTTP/HTTPS request to the webmaster’s server with the necessary information, along with a standardized Accept header.

As a result, search engines — like Microsoft Bing and Yandex — can build their own databases of the web, as well as fix issues on their own sites more rapidly.

This approach has been adopted by many leading search engines including Yandex and Baidu, who both already support IndexNow notifications through their browsers.

Enters Bing and Yandex

The main purpose of indexing more than one search engine is to make sure that your rankings are accurate. If you only check one search engine (or manually check another) you might assume that you have better rankings than you do because the SEO of one site is better than another. Obviously, this isn’t the case and it can lead to false interpretations.

If you’re using the IndexNow API, Microsoft has updated its help documentation to make it clearer how you should set up the URLs.

The IndexNow protocol ensures that all URLs submitted by webmasters to any IndexNow-enabled search engine immediately get submitted to all other similar search engines. As a result of co-sharing URLs submitted to IndexNow-enabled search engines, webmasters just need to notify one API endpoint. Not only does this save effort and time for webmasters, but it also helps search engines in discovery, thus making the internet more efficient.

More sites have come aboard

According to Microsoft, more than 80,000 websites have turned on the IndexNow feature that pushes their pages to search engine indexes. Last year the company said 60,000 of those websites were using IndexNow directly through Cloudflare, which added a toggle button to let sites use this feature:

80k websites have already started publishing and reaping the benefits of faster submission to indexation.

Now, Bing search results and Yandex search results can be integrated into a website or blog with a WordPress plugin for IndexNow.

Co-sharing URLs is now enabled, which should make your content flow faster between Bing and Yandex, and hopefully you’ll see adoption from other search engines going forward.

However, if you are more about keeping your online activity under wraps, we recommend our top private search engines to mask your presence.

Will you be using IndexNow to enhance your search engine? Let us know in the comments section below.