Hello,
Thank you for sharing the errors you have been getting with Instant Indexing and Google Search Console. I’m sorry for the inconvenience this has caused you. Let me try to explain what’s going on and how you can fix it.
As we explained before, the 429 error means that the IndexNow API has received too many requests from your IP address to index your pages. This can happen if you have the auto-submit option enabled in Rank Math and you update your pages frequently. When you do that, Rank Math will automatically send a request to the IndexNow API every time you save a change on your page. The IndexNow API has a limit on how many requests it can handle from one IP address per day, so if you exceed that limit, you will get the 429 error.
That said, this error does not mean that search engines will not index your pages at all. It just means that you cannot send requests to the IndexNow API for the remainder of the day, i.e. you’ll have to wait until the next day to send more requests. However, if you want to avoid this error in the future, you have two options:
- You can change your API key in Rank Math. This should typically resolve the issue, if it does not, it might mean that another website on your server (that you share an IP with) has been sending a lot of URLs to the IndexNow API. This is especially true if you use a shared hosting server.
- You can disable the auto-submit option in Rank Math. This will stop Rank Math from sending requests to the IndexNow API every time you update your pages/pages, or create new ones. You can still manually request indexing from Rank Math > Instant Indexing > Submit URLs or Rank Math > Instant Indexing > Console (if you have the Google Indexing API plugin installed).
Either of the options should resolve the 429 error issue for you. You can learn more about these options here: https://rankmath.com/kb/how-to-fix-429-error-with-indexnow-api/
Please note: the IndexNow API is different from the Google Indexing API. The IndexNow API submits your posts to Bing and Yandex and comes prepacked with the Rank Math plugin, you just have to enable it from Rank Math > Dashboard > Modules > Instant Indexing but to use the Google Indexing API you have download an additional addon plugin.
Now, regarding the issue of your page not getting indexed by Google, I checked the screenshot you shared and I noticed that Google says “URL is unknown to Google”. This means that Google is unaware of your page, to investigate this, you can check your sitemap status in Google Search Console under Sitemaps. If you see any errors or warnings there, please fix them and resubmit your sitemap. If you don’t see any issues there, please share a screenshot of your sitemap page with us so we can check it further. It also looks like the example post you shared was published a few days ago, depending on your Google crawl budget, Google might have not crawled your site yet which could explain why Google is reporting the URL as “Unknown to Google”.
Something else you can do is to use the URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console to request indexing for your page manually. Just enter your page URL in the tool and click on Request Indexing. This will tell Google to crawl and index your page as soon as possible. If there are any problems with your page that prevent it from being indexed, Google will show them to you in the tool.
I hope this helps you understand what’s happening with your site and how you can improve it. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns. We’re always here to assist you.
Thank you for choosing Rank Math. Have a great day! 😊
