Google Search Console temporarily drops request indexing feature

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:

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.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.