Using Crawler Hints in Google, you can add an additional way to tell search engines about your new URLs and content changes.
Yeah, Google doesn’t support it for now. But you never know! That could change.
What is Crawler Hints in Cloudflare?
Crawler hints is an inbuilt function in Cloudflare, launched in 2021, that offers a new ability to ping search engines about your new URLs.
Crawler Hints provide high quality data to search engine crawlers on when content has been changed on sites using Cloudflare, allowing them to precisely time their crawling, avoid wasteful crawls, and generally reduce resource consumption of customer origins, crawler infrastructure, and Cloudflare infrastructure in the process
Rather than just constantly pinging about URLs, and wasting server resources, Cloudflare can monitor for actual changes and only tell them when the content is worth re-indexing after a change.
Shortly after launching, Cloudflare enabled IndexNow inside Crawler Hints,
What is IndexNow?
IndexNow is a new way to pinging search engines about your content. Much like the old ‘WordPress’ ping system, or even similar to submitting a sitemap, IndexNow pings supported search engines your URLs to help them keep updated.
In its simplest form, IndexNow is a simple ping 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.
It’s nothing super-advanced, but any bit helps when it comes pinging search engines your new URLs.
How to use IndexNow on Cloudflare
- Go to Caching > Configuration in the sidebar;
2. Enable tickbox under Crawler Hints section
It’s that easy.
Is IndexNow Worth Using?
Well, it takes 2 minutes to turn on with Cloudflare and its free. So yes, IndexNow is worth using.
Does IndexNow actually make a difference?
That’s what we’re yet to find out. But even if its only Bing and some other search engines using it, its free so its worth just throwing on. You never know.
Does Google Support IndexNow?
No, Google does not currently support the IndexNow protocols. However, Google has shown interest so they may support it in the future.
So, for 2 minutes of work you can hopefully improve your sites indexation in Tier 2 search engines.
