Google has temporarily suspended the Request Indexing tool from October 14, missing out on the popular Christmas shopping season.
The Request Indexing tool, which is relatively popular among webmasters, was commonly used whenever a content piece was updated and one wanted it to be indexed by Google quickly.
Everyone was hopeful that the tool would be back before Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but that wasn’t the case. The expectation stemmed from the advice Google posted for e-commerce sites named “Best practices for Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages,”. It recommended submitting pages for recrawl once the structured data is updated on the site so that the content gets updated quickly. However, Google later added a note stating that the tool is under maintenance as of publication date, and it’ll be back soon.
However, it wasn’t fixed before Black Friday and Cyber Monday and continues to be suspended.
Here is how Danny Sullivan responded on Twitter about the subject
I believe the tool still provides a lot of functionality but that you’re asking about the request indexing part? That’s still not yet ready to be reenabled. cc: @JohnMu
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) December 7, 2020
Here is what Gary Illyes had to say about it
a scientific study(*) revealed that most people used the request indexing feature for reasons that arguably should be considered a crime against microchips.
* – by me during west coast morning coffee pic.twitter.com/d3mn8hSxDR
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (@methode) December 8, 2020
It is evident that many SEO professionals use this tool for quick indexing, upon observing the community’s discussion around it. Hence, the tool not being fixed before the shopping season has been seen as more bothersome than the Google December core update.
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