Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that the Indexing API is not for use on all types of content. He said it only should be used for job posting & live stream structured data. Anything else you want to push to Google, use XML Sitemaps he said.
Here are the tweets related to this:
The indexing API is *only* for job posting & live stream structured data. For everything else, just use sitemaps.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 1, 2019
Yeah, this is only for job posting & livestream structured data — that’s clearly documented.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 3, 2019
There are people using it and plugging it into their CMS platforms without fully realizing they shouldn’t be doing so for content that is not specific to job posting or live streams. But people are doing it and assuming it is why Google is indexing the content quickly. That may be the case but Google specifically says this is only to be used for those two types of content.
We have speculated it might be expanded to future content since Bing is pushing publishers to use their indexing API instead of depending on their web crawler, but that has not been the case with Google.
So for now – don’t use Google’s indexing API for all web content. It probably looks like it might work, but probably does not. And if too many people do it, Google might decide they want to take action. So be careful.
Forum discussion at Twitter.