Google announced it has suspended, temporarily, the request indexing feature, within the URL inspection tool in Search Console. It didn't say why, outside of making infrastructure changes. But it comes at a bad time as tons of sites are complaining about indexing issues with Google Search.
Google wrote on Twitter "We have disabled the "Request Indexing" feature of the URL Inspection Tool, in order to make some infrastructure changes. We expect it will return in the coming weeks. We continue to find & index content through our regular methods, as covered here."
We have disabled the "Request Indexing" feature of the URL Inspection Tool, in order to make some infrastructure changes. We expect it will return in the coming weeks. We continue to find & index content through our regular methods, as covered here: https://t.co/rMFVaLht6V
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) October 14, 2020
You can try it, but it will be grayed out and say "indexing requests are currently suspended."
Now, the issue is, that tons of SEOs are right now running to this tool to to get pages that normally are indexed by Google automatically, to manually get them indexed. But that is not available now and SEOs are pretty upset with the state of Google search and indexing. Oh, so you know, I bet Googlers are not too happy right now but they are working through it, as are SEOs.
Like John said, most sites do not need or use this feature.
Just for context, this does not affect normal crawling and indexing. In general, sites never need to use this feature (and most of them have never used it at all). https://t.co/nfOlB3w4kZ
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 14, 2020
But many are now because of the indexing issues over the past few weeks.
The indexing API is not an option because it is only for job listings and live events:
The indexing API is only for certain kinds of content, as documented. Everything else is ignored there.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 15, 2020
Here is more from John Mueller of Google on responding to these complaints:
I get that. The thing with crawling & indexing is that a lot of it (not all) comes down to "how likely are we to show content from this site in search". Forcing content into the index doesn't make that more likely. Ideally a site would be so awesome that search chases after it.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 15, 2020
It is not a ranking thing:
This is not a ranking change. It's not something that applies to the majority of the sites. It's purely about that specific tool.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 15, 2020
I think it's kinda like the close-door button :), but I'm basing that on how theoretical knowledge, I haven't tried it. Which ones would you submit, the old URLs or the new ones? Now I'm curious to try it out once things are back...
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 14, 2020
So hold tight, it has been a wild month or so with Google and it seems we are not done with it yet.
Are the indexing issues and the request indexing feature going offline related? Might be.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
