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The "Request Indexing" feature is now back and available!
At 8:40pm Oct 14, 2020. Google annouced the disabling of the “Request Indexing” feature of the URL Inspection Tool within Google Search Console. The feature has been disabled “in order to make some infrastructure changes.” Google said the feature should be back in some few weeks.
The annoucement was done on twitter as shown below
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: https://t.co/rMFVaLht6V
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) October 14, 2020
Normal indexing will not be affected: Google said it will continue to index sites through normal crawling and indexing. It linked to this developer document on how Google crawls and indexes the web.
But for now, cannot use the Request Indexing feature in Search Console to push content to Google Search.
John Mueller of Google also said this on Twitter:
Just for context, this does not affect normal crawling and indexing. In general, sites never need to use this feature (and most of them have never used it at all). https://t.co/nfOlB3w4kZ
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 14, 2020
This feature should be back in some few weeks while Google makes infrastructure changes.