The URL Inspection Tool inside Google Search Console is down. Requests made to Inspect Any URL that is on a verified website in Google’s Search Console has a message saying that you need to try back in a few hours.
The URL Inspection Tool inside Google Search Console allows you to get certain information about any URL, such as whether or not the page is indexed in the Google search engine. In some cases this is not necessarily accurate, as it may show that a page is indexed but it is not indexed (yet) by the search engine. In other cases it will say that it’s not indexed yet–but they may have crawled the URL. In any case, if you update a web page or you add a new blog post or page on your site, I recommend manually submitting the page to Google. You would use the url inspection tool in order to do that.
I plan on finishing up this particular blog post and then submitting it–I’ll see if the url inspection tool is, in fact, down and whether or not this new blog post gets indexed or not. I’ll add any updates below.
Getting Pages Indexed in Google
In one new research study I am working on, I registered a lot of new domain names, added content to those domain names (unique content) in an effort to see which TLD (Top Level Domain) gets indexed first. After about a week, Google had not indexed any pages of any of the new websites. However, I verified each domain name/website in Google Search Console, and submitted one page of each domain name. Within minutes, Google had these pages indexed, the submitted pages via the url inspection tool.
One hour later, only a few of the domain names/sites had more than one page indexed, and several hours later the site, 3.5 hours later, 28-40 percent of the pages were indexed. Some TLDs tend to get their pages indexed quicker than other TLDs. So, it pays to register and use domain names on certain Top Level Domains. At the end of January 2020 I will be releasing the full report, including all the TLDs that were tested in this research study. Sign up for my email newsletter to be one of the first to know when this study is released.
Update
Looks like the tool was down for about half an hour or so, and is back up and running again. I was able to finally use the tool to manually submit this blog post URL, and it’s now in the Google index. The tool being down can happen from time to time–and it’s back up and running now.