As promised last time we are working on improving our SEO game. We have been working with Ostr.io on improving our SEO and now we have also implemented IndexNow.

IndexNow is an easy way for websites owners to instantly inform search engines and web crawlers used for information retrieval (“search engines”) about latest content changes on their website. In its simplest form, IndexNow is a simple ping so that search engines know that a URL and its content has been added, updated, or deleted, allowing search engines to quickly reflect this change in their search results.

Without IndexNow, it can take days to weeks for search engines to discover that the content has changed, as search engines don’t crawl every URL often. With IndexNow, search engines know immediately the "URLs that have changed, helping them prioritize crawl for these URLs and thereby limiting organic crawling to discover new content."

So what does this mean in effect on Literary Universe?

Every time you publish new blog post, story, chapter, universe we ping the IndexNow service with the relevant pages that search engines should index.

In addition if your content is Czech we also reach out to Seznam.cz to let them know Naver for Korean content and Yandex for Russian content.

All content also is send to Bing and the entire IndexNow network. Bing especially is important for AI searches so we have also focused on making sure that our results are well managed there.

These include improved oEmbed, site maps, robots.txt and many more. As previously stated we will seek continuous improvement in this area, but things probably won’t be as flashy going forward.

Besides the IndexNow feature we have also fixed any bugs that we have discovered on the way like a bug in encyclopedia text area.

Another behind the scenes improvement has been to our emails. This goes more into the section of addressing our technical dept where our old templating system was throwing security warnings. While they were not related to production it wasn’t optimal and could make us overlook a regular warning that needed our attention. Since there was no hope of this being fixed any time soon, we have switched to a different templating engine. As a result emails you will receive from us will now look a bit different as we took the opportunity to re-design things a bit and we will fiddle with this a lot more in the future.

In the coming days we will release a set of new and improved features, so be sure to check back soon!