Naver, Korean search engine, now supports IndexNow

Naver, the 24-year-old South Korean search engine, now supports the IndexNow protocol. That makes four search engines that use IndexNow to discover and index content for their search engines. Those four search engines include Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver.

Naver and IndexNow. Naver announced this on their blog in Korean saying starting today, Naver Search supports IndexNow so that search engines can recognize the latest website content. Naver posted how this works in its webmaster portal (again in Korean language) over here.

They posted a disclaimer that all search engines have posted, “It should be noted that the IndexNow protocol notifies search engines of changes in the website quickly, but does not guarantee the indexing of the webpage.”

What is IndexNow. IndexNow provides a method for website owners to instantly inform search engines about the latest content changes on their websites. IndexNow is a simple ping protocol so that search engines know that a URL and its content have been added, updated, or deleted, allowing search engines to reflect this change in their search results quickly. The co-sharing of IndexNow went fully live in January 2022.

How it works. The protocol is very simple — all you need to do is create a key on your server, and then post a URL to the search engine to notify IndexNow-participating search engines of the change. The steps include:

1. Generate a key supported by the protocol using the online key generation tool.
2. Host the key in text file named with the value of the key at the root of your web site.
3. Start submitting URLs when your URLs are added, updated, or deleted. You can submit one URL or a set of URLs per API call.

Submit one URL is easy as sending a simple HTTP request containing the URL changed and your key.
https://www.bing.com/IndexNow?url=url-changed&key=your-key and the same would work by using https://yandex.com/indexnow?url=url-changed&key=your-key. You can see the specific Naver documentation over here.

Google. Google was testing IndexNow but it is unclear if Google will ever adopt IndexNow. If they do, that should help increase adoption for this protocol.

Why we care. As more and more search engines, and more and more CMS platforms, adopt IndexNow, it should help reduce server load on your sites, while increasing search engine efficiency with finding new content.