Google announced it has suspended, temporarily, the request indexing feature, within the URL inspection tool in Search Console. It didn’t say why, outside of making infrastructure changes. But it comes at a bad time as tons of sites are complaining about indexing issues with Google Search.

Google wrote on Twitter “We have disabled the “Request Indexing” feature of the URL Inspection Tool, in order to make some infrastructure changes. We expect it will return in the coming weeks. We continue to find & index content through our regular methods, as covered here.”

You can try it, but it will be grayed out and say “indexing requests are currently suspended.”

Now, the issue is, that tons of SEOs are right now running to this tool to to get pages that normally are indexed by Google automatically, to manually get them indexed. But that is not available now and SEOs are pretty upset with the state of Google search and indexing. Oh, so you know, I bet Googlers are not too happy right now but they are working through it, as are SEOs.

Like John said, most sites do not need or use this feature.

But many are now because of the indexing issues over the past few weeks.

The indexing API is not an option because it is only for job listings and live events:

Here is more from John Mueller of Google on responding to these complaints:

It is not a ranking thing:

So hold tight, it has been a wild month or so with Google and it seems we are not done with it yet.

Are the indexing issues and the request indexing feature going offline related? Might be.

Forum discussion at Twitter.