'request indexing' is disabled in google. They said it was going to take a few weeks to fix the indexing problem but it's still disabled. Any idea when it will be enabled again?
I believe it had something to do with the elections, and that they're over, the feature will be back soon.
NEWS (November 9, 2020): -- URL submission tool is not yet back -- However, Googler John Mueller asks (for information only) webmasters to indicate why they might need the url indexing tool Mueller's announcement: https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1325723111480758273 The form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSenIs-5PtOC-fbcHwLwXXvb5swSU5oYNAc7c-ggI-r0Jor0ig/viewform
Not good. Basically, it's not coming back. Sad. Or am I reading too much into John Mueller's question? The obvious answer is: Webmasters need the tool to get their new URLs indexed faster. Or if a page got updated they want to make sure the bot rescans it. Even though they claim the bot eventually scans / indexes all sites, it's not always the case. Maybe it does, but anyone who has sites with thousands of pages knows that the bot is severely behind.
Yeah, I thought so as well... but as you correctly said, elections are over but the indexing tool is not back.
The "request indexing" function in Google search console is still disabled, the reason is that these past few weeks the search engine is preparing to roll an update called Google Core Update this November and will be rolled out until December 2020. Google is saving these crawling budget for this big update in search.
I am not really sure but I don't really think that they are going to be taking it down forever. Reading between the lines, Google says it will take a few weeks, and now Mueller in his tweet is asking us why we really need it, makes me wonder if they really know how crucial that tool is. Its really been frustrating especially when you want to index some pages with newer changes. I just imagine that it could take many weeks or even months to reindex updated content. Unless they are updating their crawler to increase the frequency of crawls so that they can index new changes faster, though that is very unlikely. Only if John knew. Hopefully it will be back soon.