Google announced on their Webmasters Twitter handle that they will be temporarily disabling the “Request Indexing” feature of their URL Inspection Tool. This tool could be accessed from the Google Search Console. The announcement was as follows:
The URL Inspection Tool was primarily used to request a crawl of URLs individually. This is important after a new page is added or changes are made to an existing page of a website. Though not a full proof action, it necessarily accelerates the rate at which Google indexes the new content.
Google had mentioned previously that it does not “guarantee” immediate indexing through this process and may even choose not to index the new content at all.
Since it has been mentioned “infrastructure changes” it might lead to some enhancements to this feature and the inside story is that this might take at least a few weeks if not a few months.
Google has mentioned that it will continue to detect and index new content through their regular methods so it is something that site owners need not worry about much. Site owners can make do without this feature temporarily it will not have any noticeable impact.
