10 min read
When running a Shopify business, you want your content to be discovered quickly and rank high on search engines. Yet, traditional crawlers can take hours or days, causing you to lose engagement opportunities. Luckily, with the IndexNow protocol, you can ensure your new or updated posts get discovered and indexed instantly.
Using IndexNow gives you a competitive advantage because search engines don’t waste time on unchanged pages. Instead, they focus on fresh content, helping it appear in traditional search results as well as in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or other AI-powered search results sooner.
In this article, we’ll guide you through the process of how to add IndexNow to Shopify. We’ll show you how to do it automatically with the TinyIMG Shopify app and manually.
Shopify SEO optimizerFree plan availableWhat is IndexNow?
IndexNow is an open-source ping protocol that immediately notifies search engines about your website content changes, including updates, new publications, and deletions. This means you don’t need to wait for search engines to periodically find and index your site.
Traditionally, search engines crawl your site by following hyperlinks to find new or updated content. Once it’s found, they index it by analyzing the content, media, and other page elements before storing it in a database. This can take anywhere from a few hours to even days.
That’s where IndexNow comes into play – you can instantly notify engines about changes, helping discover and rank your content faster.
The way it works is once you publish new content or update old one, your site submits a URL to IndexNow which then sends a ping to search engines.
Search engines receive the ping and instantly prioritize crawling and indexing your page. Here’s a visual example of how the feature functions:
IndexNow isn’t just useful for traditional search engines, like Bing or Yandex. It’s also a great way to make your content more attractive for AI-powered search engines. That’s because they prioritize real-time content to deliver users with the most up-to-date information.
How to add IndexNow to Shopify
There are two ways to implement IndexNow to Shopify – automatically using an app or manually. Here’s how to do it with both of them:
Add IndexNow automatically using TinyIMG
The easiest way to add IndexNow to your Shopify website is to use a Shopify app, like TinyIMG. It automates URL submission to search engines, so the newest version of your pages are always visible on search results pages faster.
TinyIMG automatically generates an API key, which is used to ensure submitted URLs come from the authorized source, and validates it for you. So, you can enable IndexNow in one click without dealing with any prior setup.
Here’s a quick guide on how to use a Shopify IndexNow app:
- Download the TinyIMG app (that has the IndexNow feature) from the Shopify store.
- Install the app to your store and follow the setup instructions.
- Head to Improve SEO > Set up IndexNow.
- Click “Activate” in the “Automatic URL submission” section. You’ll be able to view the latest URL submissions in the table below.
- That’s it – all of your updates are being submitted automatically.
Add IndexNow manually using TinyIMG
Some apps with the IndexNow feature, including TinyIMG, allow manually submitting URLs too. All you have to do is:
- Download TinyIMG – an SEO app with a one-click IndexNow setup.
- Set up the app as per instructions.
- Head to Improve SEO > Set up IndexNow.
- Click “Activate” by the “Automatic URL submission” section.
- The “Manual URL submission” section will appear. You can enter up to 1000 URLs (one per line).
- Click Submit.
Add IndexNow manually using Webhooks
The manual process of adding IndexNow takes much longer. You’ll need to create multiple Webhooks for different events, including collection creation, collection update, and product creation, and product updates.
Additionally, unlike the TinyIMG feature, it can only be enabled for collection and product pages.
Here’s an example of how to create a Webhook for product updates:
- Open Shopify Admin and head to Settings.
- Head to Notifications and open Webhooks.
- Click Create webhook.
- Under the Event section, select Product update.
- Choose JSON under the Format section.
- In the URL bar, insert this link and replace the “www.exampledomain.com” with your own domain: https://www.kiaora.digital/indexnow/shopify-webhook.php?domain=www.exampledomain.com&type=products
- Select the latest Webhook API version.
- Click Save.
- Repeat the process for all events.
You can test if it works by updating a product page and checking the log file using this URL:
https://www.kiaora.digital/indexnow/logs/www.exampledomain.com/indexnow_log.txt
If it works, you should see something similar to this:
If it doesn’t work, check if you inserted your domain correctly. For example, if your store is hosted on a subdomain, such as subdomain.example.com, or a root domain, like example.com, then don’t add the “www.” part.
IndexNow: benefits and the future
IndexNow is a powerful feature that helps website owners boost their Shopify SEO efforts. It helps improve crawl efficiency and ensure faster indexing. It can lead to your pages appearing in search results way quicker than waiting for search engine crawlers to discover changes traditionally.
At the moment, IndexNow is supported by Microsoft Bing, Yep, Naver, Yandex, and Seznam.cz search engines. You can also leverage it for AI-powered search engines which focus on discovering real-time content.
However, IndexNow is not yet adopted by Google. While there have been hints to Google testing the protocol, it’s not yet known when it’s going to be implemented. With search engines continuing to advance, IndexNow could become a standard for real-time site indexing to provide the most fresh content to users.
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Frequently asked questions
Using IndexNow on Shopify is now extra easy because you can do it using the TinyIMG app. All it takes is clicking the “Activate” button under the IndexNow feature, and all of your URLs will be automatically submitted after each change.
No, Google doesn’t support IndexNow yet. They’ve revealed to Search Engine Journal the plans to test the protocol in 2021, however, no further updates have been given.
Yes, IndexNow is highly useful even if your site has a sitemap. Sitemaps are primarily used to provide the main information about the site’s pages, images, videos, and other files. However, search engines don’t visit them frequently, so your changes may be overlooked longer. Meanwhile, IndexNow ensures you don’t have to wait for search engines to discover your new or updated content.
