Duda – Professional Website Builder – Supports IndexNow

Back in late October, Duda began rolling out support for the IndexNow protocol which pushes updated content to search engines for them to crawl on-demand.
 
For those unfamiliar with Duda, we’re a web design platform for agencies, web professionals, and SaaS platforms to build websites for customers. We have over 17,000 active agencies totaling nearly 1 million active websites on the platform.
 
Duda rolled out IndexNow across our entire population of websites, automatically for all of our customers. Whenever you publish a website with a change – Duda sends that to the search engines that support IndexNow. Since Duda is SaaS software and we host all websites, it was easy for us to roll this out at scale. We’re big fans of the approach to indexing and crawling that IndexNow Enables.

Push is better than Pull

We strongly believe that pushing changes to 3rd parties that need your data/content is a better approach than passively pulling/crawling.
 
Being able to push and ask a search engine to crawl and index a page closer to the time it was published is a much-needed update for all search engines. The frequent delay from when content is first published to when it first shows up in search results is too big today, often taking weeks for content to be updated.
 
This is a common source of frustration and confusion that Duda sees with new website designers & developers. The delay between content published and visibility in search engines is confusing, as compared to more modern channels, like social. We hope that more support for IndexNow can reduce this common frustration we see with search engines.
 
While we think the approach that IndexNow is taking is great – for platforms like Duda, it is not always easy to know when to push content to search engines.

Identifying pages that have been updated is not so easy

The IndexNow API asks that you only ping them with a page URL that has updated content. Within Duda, we allow a wide range of updates to pages to take place:

• Design changes such as style changes, re-ordering of content, and the like.
• Updating of content on the page (text, images, buttons, forms, etc.)
• Managing page metadata: Titles, Descriptions, OpenGraph tags, etc…
• Global changes (like global style changes) that change the page
• And more…

Identifying each change made and understanding if it affects a specific page can be difficult. Duda had to do some engineering work to know when a page was affected by a change made in the editor. As you can tell, this is not straightforward. We went through the hard work of identifying these changes and making sure we can inform the IndexNow API when specific pages have been updated.

IndexNow is a step forward
At Duda, we believe that asking search engines to crawl websites is a much better approach than delaying crawling. It is a fundamentally more scalable approach and leads to better & faster results.
 
We’re excited to see search engines roll this out and we hope to see more widespread adoption from other search engines.

Thanks, Duda team.

Source: Bing Blog Feed