Yoast Founder Says IndexNow Does Not Lead To More Traffic Or Improved Crawl Efficiency

Some of you may be wondering why Yoast or WordPress have not integrated the Microsoft backed IndexNow protocol. Well, Joost de Valk, the founded of Yoast said he has seen zero evidence that IndexNow helps sites gain more traffic or reduces crawling or improves crawl efficiency.

Here is what Joost de Valk said on Twitter “As far as I’m aware, we’ve still not seen evidence that it (1) actually helps sites/site owners get more traffic and (2) reduces crawling / improves crawl efficiency (and thus reduces energy consumption). Joost went on to said “as far as I can tell, it does the opposite of 2, in fact.”

So you are saying IndexNow is less efficient than typical crawling?

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) March 1, 2022

He then went on to explain he wants proof because he does not see any evidence of this:

Well, it’s not up to us to explain this. I’m waiting for Bing to actually show *improved* crawling and have so far been unable to get that proof. I think including it in Yoast SEO without that proof would be bloat…

— Joost de Valk (@jdevalk) March 1, 2022

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So Fabrice Canel from Microsoft said on Twitter “let’s remind all SEOs that the primary value of IndexNow is to quickly reflect latest content changes in search engines. Be indexed first, fast is SEO critical these days. IndexNow provides on most sites a clear signal and we are committed to leverage it to crawl more efficiently.”

Let’s remind all SEOs that the primary value of IndexNow is to quickly reflect latest content changes in search engines. Be indexed first, fast is SEO critical these days. IndexNow provides on most sites a clear signal and we are committed to leverage it to crawl more efficiently

— Fabrice Canel (@facan) March 1, 2022

As a reminder, Duda, All In On SEO and Rank Math SEO recently added support for IndexNow, Cloudflare added support a while back, Microsoft built their own WordPress plugin and Google promised to test it.

If Yoast and WordPress add it by default, that would be huge. But I am not sure that would happen without Google adopting it.

I do find the efficiency questions interesting because that was one of the major pushes for adoption of IndexNow.

Don’t get me wrong, I do have IndexNow enabled for this site…

Forum discussion at Twitter.