Find out why your Google Search Console is telling you “Page Actions Are Temporarily Disabled” and what this means for indexing new pages on your site.
On the 14th of October 2020, Google Search Console started showing the following error to users attempting to expedite their page indexing through individual URL inspection tool in Google Search Console:
“The “Request Indexing” feature of the URL Inspection Tool has been disabled in order to make some technical updates. We expect it to be re-enabled in the coming weeks. In the meanwhile, Google continues to find and index content through our regular method.”
What This Means for New Pages
If you’re in the habit of using the URL inspection tool to speed up the indexing process for your pages, this notification may have sent chills down your spine. But here’s why you don’t need to get worked up about it.
As always, the Googlebot will periodically crawl your website looking for site updates and new pages. For well-maintained websites, you can expect your pages to index in a matter of hours – for clunky websites; this could mean waiting days or weeks for your pages to index.
What This Means for Pages With Updates
There is no set timetable for how quickly Google will index a new page. From our experience, indexing can take anywhere from a few minutes to several days or even months for some websites. The index rate of Google is dependent on a multitude of factors, including website age, website authority, and the number of pages on your site.
Will This Feature Return to Search Console?
At a guess – yes. Google is likely reviewing the way that they handle these requests and might be reviewing the number of individual URLs requests that users are currently able to submit in a single day. As of October 2020, users were able to submit up to 50 individual URLs for inspection. Of course, there was a period where users were able to submit as many individual URLs for indexing in a single day; alas, those days are long gone.
Our intuition tells us that Google will be reducing the number of individual URLs that users can fetch in a single day.
What You Should Do
Whatever you do, don’t freak out about it.
The URL inspection tool is a handy tool that SEO’s and webmasters have been using for the last few years to speed up the indexation of the new and important website on their site. Whether you’re looking for google to update rankings following changes on your page or trying to get new, timely content submitted to Google as quickly as possible – this won’t change things too much.
The request indexing feature in Google Search Console may marginally improve indexation speed of a page, but it should not be the only reason that Google finds that content. Your site should be easy to crawl – if you are relying on the request indexing feature for new content to get indexed on your site, this could be the push you need to make much-needed site changes.
Wait, How Did you Find Out About it?
Safari Digital is Sydney’s Leading SEO Company, and – in many ways, we’re just like you. We can be a little impatient when it comes to getting new content indexed. On Sunday the 18th of October, we noticed that the request indexing feature was missing in Google Search Console. Like you, we investigated the cause and looked into the reasons why page actions are temporarily disabled in Search Console.
What Next?
Hold tight; Google is likely to resume this feature in the coming week as they review the functionality of the individual URL inspection function. If you are looking to expedite the indexation process of your site, you may need to submit your entire sitemap to search console for review. Page Actions Are Temporarily Disabled – hang tight, normal service should resume shortly.
