Automatic Indexing
Let Byword handle your indexing for you
Once you've connected Byword to Google Search Console, you can have Byword automatically index your content for you. You can see your indexing dashboard here.
What is indexing, and why is this important?
Just because Google has found your site's content, doesn't mean that it'll actually appear in search results. For it to appear on results pages, and for you to start getting traffic, you need your content to be indexed.
Getting your content indexed can be a lengthy process, especially for newer sites. Byword helps speed up this process by connecting with the Google Indexing API, meaning that you can start getting traffic to your content as quickly as possible.
Setup
This is an advanced Byword feature and requires careful setup. Please be sure to follow all the steps below carefully.
To get started, first head to Google Cloud Platform, and create a new project.
Next, you'll need to enable the two following APIs. You can enable each by heading to the links below, and clicking Enable:
We'll then head to the service accounts page, and create a new service account.
Fill out the details on the following page. These don't matter for functionality - just use details that make sense to you.
You may be asked to fill in two optional steps around granting access. You can skip both of these and hit 'Done'.
In your service account dashboard, click the dots next to your newly created service account, and hit Manage Keys.
You'll then want to create a new JSON key, by following the steps below.
Nearly there - one last step!
Take the email that was associated with your service account from earlier (e.g. your version of byword-indexing@byword.iam.gserviceaccount.com) and add it to your Search Console as an owner.
You can do this by heading here, and clicking Add User.
You'll then want to add the email from earlier as an Owner. Note that Owner permissions are required for indexing to work.
And that's it - now you're good to go! You can head back to the indexing dashboard and use the JSON key that was downloaded earlier to authenticate with your sites.
Byword will run a quick check to make sure that all of the above has worked, and then you'll be able to enable automatic indexing.
How it works, and limits
When you have automatic indexing enabled, Byword will submit URLs from your site's sitemaps to Google's indexing API on a daily basis. There are a couple of points to note about how Byword does this:
Google has a limit of 200 URLs per day, per Google Cloud Project. This means that if you only have one site, or are just using this feature on one site, Byword will index 200 URLs per day.
If you have multiple sites, and use the same key across them, Byword will attempt to evenly distribute your quota across all sites. For example, if you have 4 sites running on the same key with indexing enabled, then Byword will index 50 URLs per site per day.
You can create multiple Google Cloud projects, and with that multiple service accounts and multiple different keys. To do so, simply follow the Setup guide above. This will give you a quota of 200 URLs per day per project (or key, assuming you use one key per project). This can be useful if you own multiple large sites.
Automatic indexing requires a Byword subscription to activate. The starter plan allows you to index a single site, while all other plans allow you to index an unlimited number of sites.
Byword submitting a URL to the indexing API is not a guarantee that the URL will get indexed. Doing so will greatly increase the probability that the URL will be indexed, and decrease the timeframes for doing so however.
FAQs
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