Google said it has disabled the “Request Indexing” feature of the URL Inspection Tool within Google Search Console. The feature has been disabled “in order to make some infrastructure changes.” Google said the feature should return in the coming weeks.
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: https://t.co/rMFVaLht6V
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) October 14, 2020
Normal indexing unaffected
Google said it will continue to index sites through normal crawling and indexing. It linked to this developer document on how Google crawls and indexes the web.
But you currently cannot use the Request Indexing feature in Search Console to push content to Google Search.
Now, the issue is, that tons of SEOs are right now running to this tool to to get pages that normally are indexed by Google automatically, to manually get them indexed. But that is not available now and SEOs are pretty upset with the state of Google search and indexing. Oh, so you know, I bet Googlers are not too happy right now but they are working through it, as are SEOs.
John Mueller of Google clarified this on Twitter:
Just for context, this does not affect normal crawling and indexing. In general, sites never need to use this feature (and most of them have never used it at all). https://t.co/nfOlB3w4kZ
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 14, 2020
Recent complaints
There has been a lot of complaints recently, mostly stemming from the ongoing indexing bugs, around Google not indexing content quickly enough.
Why we care. A lot of SEOs have been using the request indexing button during the past few weeks while Google has been having indexing issues. It is their way of pushing content that Google is having a hard time indexing, into Google’s index. Maybe we are over doing it and Google cannot handle the load? Maybe there are other bugs with indexing where Google had to shut this down? We are not sure.
It will come back — until then, you cannot push content to Google using the Request Indexing feature in Google Search Console.
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