Like anyone who runs a service or website on the Internet I am always interested in providing good content and of course getting better rankings in the search engines. The following article, even though it is a little bit technical, may serve as a cautionary tale to not believe everything you see or read on the Internet.
I have been running a short advertising campaign with Pinterest, something I do about once or twice a year to get my rankings and viewership a little boost. It is during these campaigns that I also usually discover something I didn't know about the Internet before. This time around the discovery is a relatively recent method to get your website material submitted to engines quickly. It is a protocol called "IndexNow" which was established by Microsoft and utilized by their search engine BING.
If you're someone who maintains a website where the content changes frequently you can go to IndexNow.org to find all the details on how to set this up. The concept is simple, once set up. Your website will automatically notify a search engine of your choosing, whenever the content is updated. Moreover as part of how the IndexNow works, initial search engine receiving the update will let related search engines know. (I think my fellow geeks, just got excited.) This is the positive part of my article and the downside has nothing to do with the IndexNow protocol, it is how unscrupulous individuals are abusing the concept. But first a little more back story:
This blog, notesintheleftmargin.com is hosted by an old and reliable service called Blogger and there are a few things it does not support, one of them being to do above mentioned protocol for search engines. So I went on a safari, so to speak, though the Internet to explore whether this problem had been addressed. Before I got to the true answer I ran into the "dark side" of information. There are tons of YouTube videos (you won't find any linked in this post) and articles pretending to give you instructions on how to implement the IndexNow feature on Blogger hosted websites. In reality however these instructions would result in spamming the search engines if followed blindly. Not only would it not help the website rankings it would probably have a very adverse effect.
It just goes to show that when reading or seeing something on the Internet you must be hypercritical. Maybe one day water will implement the ability to add the IndexNow feature into hosted sites, but not as of this writing. It needs to also be noted that IndexNow Is only useful if your site updates frequently. In the meantime blogger hosted sites can still use "Google's Search Console" or "Bing's Webmaster Tools"
Patrick
January 22, 2026 update
Just a brief update on the index now situation as a regards to Blogger.com sites like this one. I've been keeping an eye on the topic since this single post is one of the more popular posts on my site.
As of the date there is no legitimate way still to utilize the "IndexNow" protocol, which allows sites to notify search engines about new content almost immediately. By the sounds of it, Google has no plans to implement this protocol. However, I though I have not been able to collaborate the following information some online sources to indicate that Blogger sites automatically pin Google when new content is added. This is in addition to the regular site maps being scanned.
I will keep an eye on this topic and other related technologies as things continue to develop.
Take care Patrick
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