Google Search Console temporarily drops request indexing feature
29 October 2020 . minute read
This feature should be back in the upcoming weeks while Google makes infrastructure changes.
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.
The announcement. Google posted this announcement on Twitter: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. John Mueller of Google clarified this on Twitter: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
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
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.