How amazing will it be to get indexed by google and get ranked within instances? Sounds like a dream come true right? I have seen people doing frantically link building to their recently published post just to get it indexed. In this post, I will tell the trick based on google indexing API to fast index your recently published posts, web 2.0s pointing towards your money page, and guest posts on third-party websites.
Before diving any further please note the purpose this technique can be used for, the requirements for this technique to work, and its limitations.
Purposes –
- Get your recently published blogs on your own website indexed instantly
- Get web 2.0s indexed fast
- Get any video indexed fast
- Get guest posts on third party websites to get indexed fast
- Get infographics & images indexed fast
- Get your Google News articles indexed instantly
- Get your job posting indexed instantly
Requirements –
A separate domain (other than your domain on which you want your recent posts to get fast indexed) with WordPress installed, preferably an old domain & rank math SEO plugin (It is highly recommended that you do not use a subdomain for this technique)
Search console ownership
Limitations –
This article covers technique only for websites using WordPress
The default daily publish requests are 200, including URL update, URL deleted or NEW publish URLs (you can request to increase the quota)
Now that you have the basic idea let’s dive in further. Let’s begin with discussing what are web 2.0s and their importance in SEO.
What are WEB 2.0s?
We all know it has become increasingly difficult to get link backs to your website and especially money pages. Most SEO’s use Web 2.0s to get easy backlinks from content on web 2.0 platforms, it is still the oldest trick in the book.
Web 2.0s according to Wikipedia are the “websites that emphasize user-generated content”, web 2.0 can be referred to any website that let its users generate content (blog, video, images).
Some popular examples of Web 2.0s are –
- Medium.com
- Youtube.com
- Facebook.com
- WIX
- Sites.google.com etc.
I hope you get the idea, now SEO’s use these to generate content and link back to their money pages to increase the authority of their URLs for better rankings. I use them too as everyone does in fact I have a separate sheet that tracks the web 2.0s status regularly with their indexing status, URLs, date, etc. as they tend to get removed (either the free plan expires or the team removes it) :-(
Since these websites have such a huge user base due to their accessibility they generate thousands of pages on a daily basis that are not crawled by google bot fast or not at all due to limited crawl budget. Hence you can use the steps below to get them indexed fast.
What is Google Indexing API?
The Google indexing API tells google about any new pages being published or updated. Hence google notifies it and crawls the pages which are in fact indexed on priority. Google claims that the indexing API can only be used for time-sensitive content like job postings or broadcast embedded in video (for live broadcast videos. But many SEO’s over the years have used this to get their content ranked fast and it is a legitimate way without any effect on your rankings.
If you have any doubts regarding whether this method actually works, you can refer to the article by my dear friend Willmann Tobias where he conducted the same experiment and found out that this method works for URLs without any job posting or live broadcast videos.
You can use this API for the following purposes on your website –
- URL update
- URL removal
- Combining HTTP connections into a single HTTP request (up to 100 calls at once allowed)
Google clearly states that this method is much faster than any other methods like updating the sitemap file etc.
Practical use cases of Google Indexing API
Getting a new blog indexed –
To show you that it works I conducted a little experiment I published a post on just 6 months old website (new websites have very less crawl budget) with very limited blogs (Hardly 30) on 16th May 2021 in the morning at 10 A.M and targeted it for keywords like “free SMTP server” or “free SMTP”, I have attached the current rankings and screenshot below for your reference.
The google bot crawled the newly published post within 5 mins of sending the request through API.
And as you can see in the screenshot below the blog was indexed on the same day in the afternoon, which usually takes a couple of days at least to index.
You can check out google’s cached version’s date and time HERE.
Note: At the time you are reading this article google could have crawled the URL multiple times and you can see a different date and time.
What’s even more amazing is that I am ranking in the top 15 for my desired keywords.
Steps to get the recently published blog fast indexed
- Download, install and activate the rank math fast indexing plugin on your WordPress website on which you have recently published the post
- Create an Indexing API project
- Go to Google API console & choose create a project and then click on “Agree and continue” button
- Once you click on “Agree and continue” you should see the next screen as below (you can now close this screen)
- Now you need to create a Service Account
- You will see a screen with your latest project that you have created
- Click on your project and then choose “create service account”
- Give a name and provide a description for your service account, and click on create remember to save the Service account ID as you will need it in later steps.
- Now you need to grant access to the service account of this project, choose the role as Owner to give full access to all resources. Then click continue
- The next step (Grant users access to this service account) is an optional step you can leave this step for now. Click done.
- Create API key
- Now in the next screen once you click done. Under the Actions Tab click on the three dots as shown in the image below and choose Manage keys
- Then under Add key tab choose “Create new key”
- In the next screen choose “JSON” as key type and click create, a JSON file will automatically start to download on your computer.
- Add service account as the owner to your search console
- Open search console and remember you will require owner access for further steps
- Go to settings of your search console
- Click on Users and permission and click on three dots against your owner account and click on manage property owners
- Now on the new page, you need to add a new owner
- Now under the email ID of the owner you need to enter the service ID, you saved from the step 3-c above
- Now refresh the users and permission tab to confirm that the service ID has been granted access to ownership rights.
- Now insert the API key in the rank math plugin
- Now you need to view the JSON file which was automatically downloaded in the 4-c step above, copy the complete file.
- On your WordPress website, you must see an “instant indexing” option under the Rank Math tab, click on the settings tab just adjacent to the console tab and paste the file and save changes.
- Now under-console when you click on Send to API you should see a success message as shown below
Note: Every time you update or publish a new post the changes will automatically be updated and sent to google indexing API. But If you want a particular URL to send you can enter the particular URL in the box where your websites URL is shown and then click on “send to API”
Steps to get other URLs indexed (web 2.0s, guest posts, youtube video URLs)
You will require a separate domain (using your money site is not recommended) with WordPress and rank math plugin installed along with search console ownership rights. I use a totally separate domain (www.freesmtpserver.org) to get web 2.0s and guest posts indexed fast.
- Follow all the above steps
- Now create a new post or page and embed the link (the one you want to be crawled – video, web 2.0s, guest posts, etc.) in the new post or page you have created.
- Publish the post/page
- Now 301 redirect this newly created URL to the web 2.0 or guest post on the third-party website URL you want to get indexed
Now you have requested the google bot to crawl the newly created URL on your website which in the case is 301 redirected to the URL which you want to get indexed. The google bot will follow the redirect and will index the URL on the third-party website which you want to get indexed.
Note – Work’s with 307 redirect as well but does not show promising results.
Conclusion
Hope you enjoyed this tutorial, as much as I enjoyed writing it. You can use this method for almost any URL to get indexed. Google will soon start prioritizing the use of the indexing API to reduce the crawling as it is not sustainable with millions of pages being made daily which the head of SEO at Shopify – Kevin agrees to in this post.
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