What Microsoft Bing’s IndexNow Means for CDN Users
Microsoft Bing today announced the rollout of IndexNow, a new protocol designed in conjunction with Yandex that can allow “websites to easily notify search engines whenever their website content is created, updated, or deleted.” The goal is to reduce the amount of time it takes for search engines to discover and index website changes — a process often measured in days and even weeks — to mitigate traffic loss and the potential adverse effects on customers and even revenues.
According to Microsoft Bing, websites implementing IndexNow will use an API that notifies search engines of updates. That quickly initiates the search engines to crawl and reflect those changes in index and search results. The intended result is faster indexing that uses fewer resources, culminating in improved experiences for site operators and their visitors.
Website owners have long been dealing with a set of conflicting concerns: search engine optimization (SEO) and the impact that site crawlers can have on scalability and performance. SEO is a critical part of any content strategy, in order to ensure that content is considered authoritative and therefore ranks highly — within the first 10 results — when a user searches for a given topic. Marketers and site owners attempting to report on the performance of their site, however, can be led astray by abnormally high page views, bounce rates, or confoundingly high or low session durations. There are a myriad of tools to address this, but search engines intend to limit crawling in the future on websites adopting IndexNow, providing one more tool for site owners.
Content delivery network (CDN) service providers like Akamai can cache customer websites to reduce bandwidth cost, accelerate those sites to improve performance, and protect the sites against malicious attacks. Sites hosted on CDNs require the same timely indexing as any other sites. In supporting IndexNow, Akamai and other CDN providers can help customers take advantage of the new protocol and enjoy the benefits of faster notifications to search engines when site content is changed in their CDN solution.
To learn more about IndexNow and how to implement it for your site, Microsoft Bing has published resources at IndexNow.org.
