So I put John Mueller of Google on the hot seat and asked him what is up with Google taking away goodies from us like the request indexing tool. He said "I am not planning on taking away anything." He said the survey was just for him to learn what, if anything, Google can do better and more efficiently.
I asked John at the 1:23 mark into the video why he surveyed SEOs about the request indexing tool, it makes people think the tool which was suspended "temporarily" is never going to come back.
People use it for good but also it attracts spammers who want to get spammy stuff in there, John explained. Google is thinking about how they can handle this automatically without dealing with it manually via a request indexing manual URL submission.
He said again there are no plans on getting rid of this feature but if Google can handle more of these requests automatically it will save everyone time. That is why he posted a survey, to figure out what does Google need to be doing differently there. John explained that a lot of the feedback they got was that it takes a few weeks for Google to index the page if it isn’t submitted manually and he said that should not be the case. He hopes to take these examples to improve Google’s systems.
Here is the video embed:
Forum discussion at YouTube Community.
