Google announced it has suspended, temporarily, the request indexing feature, within the URL inspection tool in Search Console.
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.”
There is no information as to why Google disabled the indexing feature, but it comes at a difficult time during a pandemic when small and large businesses rely heavily on SEO for digital growth and sales.
New content will now be found through a website’s sitemap. Google Guidelines mentions the following:
By providing our systems a direct list of URLs to your content, known as a sitemap, our ability to find your pages no longer relies solely on your page’s relationship to other referring pages on the wider web. This speeds up the process of our systems discovering your content. Typically, you host the sitemap on your domain in a place accessible by Googlebot.
There is no exact timeline on the indexing feature to return, just that it will return in the upcoming weeks. If you have a WordPress website, we recommend installing the Yoast SEO Plugin immediately. Follow-up by submitting the Yoast XML sitemap to search console.
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