In 2023 there have been many changes to SEO as a discipline. One major change is Google’s goal of reducing crawling and indexing frequency. The company has already cut down their number of crawling and indexing times immensely.
Why?
Reducing the number of times a site is crawled and indexed saves a tremendous amount of resources for search engines. IndexNow is a a protocol adopted by other search engines, like Bing and Yandex, to avoid having the index and crawl so much. IndexNow essentially informs search engines when content changes happen within a page so that it becomes easier and faster to crawl and index. Google has said that they were considering adopting a similar protocol, but since did not make any changes.
What’s Google doing now?
Currently, Google is just attempting to reduce crawling and indexing without using IndexNow. There is, however, increased talk of Google using something similar because of their goal to reduce their carbon footprint completely by 2030. This will require Google reducing the sheer amount of power needed by the company to power their servers and computing equipment. In order for the company to reach this goal, they will need to seriously cut down on their computing power and create more sustainable and efficient ways to crawl and index.
One Response
This is an interesting news article. I am curious how different the page outcomes will be with less sites being crawled. I suspect that they will implement AI in order to crawl more effectively so they will reduce resources like you mentioned.