Google Search Console brings back request indexing tool

It’s back. Here is a screen shot of the feature in Google Search Console:

The announcement. Google announced this on Twitter saying “We’re glad to announce that ‘Request Indexing’ is back to the Google Search Console URL Inspection – just in time for the new year!”

Google also “reminded” us that if you have “large numbers of URLs, you should submit a sitemap instead of requesting indexing” via Google Search Console. Google also said that the “requesting indexing does not guarantee inclusion to the Google index.”

Why we care. When this feature was disabled, SEOs and site owners were very much so missing it. Google has said normal indexing is not impacted but the tool was still very much missed. Google has now brought it back and you can use it to expedite crawling and potentially indexing of important URLs. These URLs might be old URLs with updated content or new URLs that you want to get into Google Search fast.

But like Google said, just because you use this tool, it does not mean Google will index the page or rank it.