Submit your articles to Google

What this does — honestly

Normally Google finds a new article whenever its crawler next visits your site — hours, days, sometimes longer. The Indexing API lets you tell Google directly that a page was just published. In practice that usually gets the page crawled within hours instead of whenever.

Two honest caveats before you spend five minutes on this. First, Google officially scopes this API to job postings and livestream pages; for ordinary articles a submission acts as a strong crawl request — it works well in practice and is what the popular WordPress “instant indexing” plugins do, but Google makes no promise. Second, being crawled is not the same as ranking: the API removes the discovery delay, nothing more.

If that trade sounds fine — it is free, takes five minutes, and is fully reversible — carry on.

Before you start

• A Google account that owns your site in Search Console. The final step adds a service account as an Owner of your Search Console property, so you need Owner access there yourself. If your site isn't in Search Console yet, add and verify it first — Google's own flow walks you through it.
• Your site connected in YoDon. The connection lives in the site's settings, one per site.

The one-time setup

Everything below is also written, with the same links, inside the app: open Sites, choose your site's Settings, and find “Google indexing”. Do it from there so you can paste the key at the end without switching around.

1. Create a Google Cloud project. Sign in with the same Google account you use for Search Console, open the create-project screen, name it anything (“my-site-indexing” is fine) and click Create. If you already have a project you're happy to use, skip this step.
2. Turn on the Indexing API. Open the Web Search Indexing API page in the API library, check that your project is selected in the bar at the top of the page — the classic stumble — and click Enable.
3. Create a service account and download its key. In IAM → Service accounts, click Create service account, give it any name, and click Done — it needs no roles. Open the account you just made, go to Keys → Add key → Create new key, choose JSON, and a small file downloads. That file is the credential; treat it like a password.
4. Paste the key into YoDon. Open the downloaded file in any text editor, copy everything, and paste it into the Google indexing box in your site's settings. YoDon stores it encrypted and shows you the service account's email address with a copy button.
5. Make that email an Owner in Search Console. In Search Console, open your site's Settings → Users and permissions → Add user, paste the service-account email, and set the permission to Owner. This is what authorises the submissions — without it Google answers every request with a refusal.

That's the whole setup. You never repeat it for this site.

Using the Index button

On the Articles page, every published article of a connected site shows an Index button. Click it and the article's URL is submitted to Google; the button remembers when, so you can see at a glance what has been sent. You can submit an article again after a major update.

Drafts don't have the button on purpose — a draft has no public page for Google to crawl. Publish first (one click from the same list), then index.

When it doesn't work

• “The service account is not an owner of this site.” Step 5 was skipped or set to a lower permission. It must be Owner, not Full or Restricted user, and on the exact property that matches your site's address.
• “Google rejected the key.” The key was deleted or disabled in Google Cloud, or the file was truncated when pasting. Download a fresh JSON key from the service account and reconnect.
• “Daily submission quota is used up.” Google's ceiling is 200 a day per project. It resets daily; try again tomorrow.
• Enabled the API but for the wrong project. The project selector at the top of Google Cloud is easy to miss. Open the Indexing API page again, confirm the selected project is the one your service account lives in, and enable it there.