What Yoast’s New Live Indexing Feature Means for Your Website

8th February 2019

Currently hosting their annual conference, search engine firm Yoast sent a wave through the SEO community this week.

Speaking at Yoastcon, their team revealed how their WordPress plugin will soon allow sites to be indexed immediately in the major search engines. Promising a far more efficient relationship with search engines, this update will effectively allow site owners to alert Google and Bing whenever they’ve created or updated their content. Rather than waiting around for Google or Bing to crawl their pages, webmasters will be able to make their new content available to searchers within an hour.

To understand the significance of this update, and how businesses stand to benefit, let’s break things down a bit.

How is my site currently indexed?

As it stands, web pages are crawled by bots from various search engines. These bots determine what the pages are about and report this information back to the search engine that sent them out. With this information, the likes of Bing and Google form indexes that are accessed the moment a user completes a search.

Whilst this process is reliable, the timing of when content is crawled just depends on how the posting time correlates with the latest crawl. While you can ensure your site is crawled more frequently by posting new content regularly, the control is with the search engines not the webmaster.

So how will Yoast’s live indexing change things?

The current indexing process takes time. Quite a bit of time, in fact. It’s estimated that a brand-new website or updates to an existing one will take anywhere between 4 days to 4 weeks for Google to index, and without a conscious effort to submit the site, it can take even longer than that. That’s a lot of time to be invisible on the internet.

It’s this delay that the Yoast update will help to remove. In turn, this update will make the web better for both businesses and users.

Here’s how.

For businesses, it will be possible to respond quickly to the needs of customers and ensure that timely content can be found right away.

For users, it will be possible to find the most relevant information as the index is being updated in real time.

Whilst Google analyst John Mu has confirmed via Twitter that live indexing will be on offer through other platforms, it seems that WordPress will be the first platform to provide this benefit.

At Nu Image, we’re big fans of WordPress. Such big fans, in fact, that we recently wrote all about the WordPress Gutenberg Update. Functional and flexible, the platform is great for creating custom websites that perform beautifully. It’s no nonsense content management system (CMS) also means our clients can easily handle aspects of their site whenever necessary.

As with all new and exciting updates which affect the platform and its relationship to SEO, we’ll be following the announcement and roll-out of Yoast’s live indexing feature with keen interest.

If you or your business require help with your SEO efforts, be sure to get in touch with us at our Norwich web design agency.