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What Google's Indexing API actually does with your blog posts

· 7 min read

There is a category of SEO tool that promises to get your pages indexed by Google. They cost between $7 and $40 a month, they show you a dashboard of successful submissions, and the mechanism underneath is almost always the same: Google's Indexing API.

Here is what that API does, from Google's documentation and from Google's own search advocates, and why the success count in those dashboards is not measuring what it appears to measure.

1. It supports two content types

The Indexing API is documented for JobPosting and BroadcastEvent. Job listings and live video events. That is the entire supported surface. Blog posts, product pages, category pages and landing pages are not on the list and never have been.

2. It accepts your URL anyway

The API does not fetch your page and check what is on it before responding. You send a URL, you get a 200. A success response means notification received. It has never meant page indexed, and it does not mean the notification will be acted on.

This is the load-bearing detail. Everything a submission dashboard shows you is derived from that response.

3. Unsupported types are ignored, not punished

This is the part people get wrong in both directions. Asked directly whether sites get penalised for using the Indexing API on other content, Google's John Mueller said there would be no penalty: "Will your site get penalized? I'd just use it properly, or not use it." He has separately said the unsupported content types are simply ignored.

So the honest summary is not "these tools are dangerous". It is narrower and worse for them: nothing happens. The one documented consequence is aimed at the tool rather than you. Google warns that attempts to abuse the API, including using multiple accounts to exceed quotas, may result in access being revoked.

Why nobody notices

Put those three facts together and you get a product that is impossible to evaluate from the inside.

You submit 500 URLs. Over the following weeks some of them get indexed, because Google was going to crawl them anyway. The dashboard shows 500 successful submissions and a rising indexed count. Did the submissions cause the indexing? There is no way to tell, because you cannot see what would have happened otherwise.

The hard question is "did this work?" The easy question is "did it say it worked?" When people cannot answer the first one, they answer the second and move on. That substitution is the entire business model.

The comparison worth making. Their dashboards are not lying about the API call. The call really was made and really did return success. They are lying about what the API call did.

The access they need to do it

There is one more thing worth knowing before you sign up for a tool like this, and you can check it in your own Search Console in about ten seconds.

Using the Indexing API on your property requires you to add the tool's service account as a site owner in Search Console. Google's prerequisites are explicit about it: add the service account as a delegated site owner.

Owner is not a read permission. An owner can add and remove other users, remove URLs from search results, and change property settings. That is the level of access the mechanism requires, and it is granted to a service account you do not control, in exchange for submissions that are ignored for every page that is not a job posting.

When the API is the right tool

It genuinely works for what it is documented for. If you run a job board and your listings expire, the Indexing API is the correct mechanism and the speed difference is real and measurable.

The honest way to build that feature is to look at the page before submitting it: confirm it really does identify itself to Google as a job posting, and refuse anything that does not. We built that check as a free tool so you can run it against your own listings, whichever product you end up using.

What we do instead

Seomely does not submit ordinary pages to Google, because doing so cannot change the outcome. We ask Google for read-only access to Search Console and nothing else, so there is no permission in our connection to change anything on your property even if we wanted to, and we record what Google says about each of your pages every day.

That is a smaller claim. It has the advantage of being checkable: every number we show you is a state Google reported, with the date it changed. You can open Search Console and verify any of it. "We submitted 500 URLs" is not something you can verify, and neither is what it implies.

See what that looks like, or run one URL through the free checker first.

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