Google Says Using The Indexing API For Other Content Types Won’t Hurt Or Help

As you know, Google has an indexing API to expedite indexing of two content types. It is only designed to work for job postings and live streaming content – that is all. John Mueller of Google was asked if it can hurt if you try to use it for other content types outside of job postings and live stream content and he said no.

While it might not hurt to try to use the API for other content types, it also won’t help, John said. It won’t help because Google will ignore it and it simply does not fit in the places Google might show it.

These two specific cases go along with specific structured data that only applies to job postings and live stream content. Using job posting schema for news articles is wrong and won’t work and if you do it in a way that tries to manipulate the search results, you can get a rich snippets penalty and not be eligible to show rich results.

Of course, submitting content to the Google Indexing API won’t do anything in that case anyway. So why do it?

You can see how John reacts to the question, like – why are you doing this?

Here is the video where he said this at the 7:02 mark:

Here is the transcript:

Question: Is it possible that we can try this API [Google Indexing API] for different type of content like some news articles or you know blog content?

Answer: I mean, people try it but essentially that’s like what we have documented is what we use the API for. So if you don’t have content that falls into those categories then the API really isn’t kind of going to help you there.

Question: I just want to understand if we give it a try will it will it impact negatively in some way?

Answer: No. No but I mean if you don’t have job postings then there’s like nothing to do with that API.

Forum discussion at YouTube Community.